Analog.Science.Fiction.and.Fact-September.2016
Author: Zamzar
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Kindle Edition, 2016 © Penny Publications

Progress Report

Rajnar Vajra | 19185 words

Illustrated by Kurt Huggins

Day 1:

Stretch. S-t-r-e-t-c-h. Claw stretch. Sniff. Bright ahead. Move into bright. Warm. Green down and ahead. Move there. Pull claws through green. Sniff, turn. Move. Noise! Stop. Watch. Motion! Food?

Stop, slow move, slow slow, stop, look— there. Something fast! Chase, chase! Jump! Miss. Food gone. Rest. Breathe. Scratch. Noise from up. Look. Motion. Jump! Can’t reach.

Lie down. Stretch. Sniff. Noise. Move closer. Something big moves slowly. Not food, but. Sniff.

Careful. Touch. Cold! Pull back. Sniff. Not food, but mouth wants. Stretch tongue. Cold. Mouth wants.

Reach tongue. Drink! Drink.

Sounds. Follow. Sounds stop. Sniff. Tired. Lie down? Not here. Sniff green. Safe scent. Follow scent. Dark ahead. Move closer. Sniff. Food! Move into dark. Food right here! Not moving, but mouth wants. Eat. Eat. All gone. Lie down, lick fur. Close eyes.

Day 2:

Stretch. Claw stretch. Sniff. Something. Food and something... else, not food but good. Brightness ahead. Shadow here. Move into brightness. Warm. Feels good. Stretch claws. Look at them. Claws from paw. Claws in, claws out. Turn paw. Thick claws, blunt, curled up. Noise from above, shadow follows below. There! High in the blue bright, something fast.

Thirsty. Follow scent to cold wet. Pull wet with tongue. Good. Enough.

Move. Green below and green around. Green on big brown things. Sniff. Rub against brown.

Stretch claws and pull though brown. Feels right. Move. Sniff. Listen. Tiny things near mouth. Soft hum. Food? Leap to eat, but tiny things dart away. Chase.

Something rustles. Where? Listen. Nothing. Feel urge. Squat and push. Better but strong smell.

Dig and cover. Move. Thirsty. Follow scent and go to cold wet.

Something moves. There! Food? Run, run! Leap! Something brown jumps away. Chase, chase.

Stop. Something is gone. Sit and lick paws. Above, less blue. Tired. Lie down? Here feels wrong.

Sniff. Follow trail back to dark. Food is here! Hungry. Eat, eat. Gone. Lick flavor. Want more. Lie down, lick paws, lick fur. Close eyes. Sound? Open eyes? Nothing. Close eyes.

Day 3:

Open eyes. No food, but... smelled good smell before. Stretch. Claw stretch. Turn paw over. More claws! But thick. Dull. Can’t stretch. Rub these on hardness beneath, again. No sharper. Outside, the bright blue is back but big white things float in it.

Move outside. Move, sniff. Move downhill. Look. Green below is not one thing, but many soft green claws. Green around is many different greens. Tall brown things are many browns. Rustles come from both sides but no chase. Listen. Watch. Something... inside... rustles without noise. Inside...

me. A me is here! I am. I am a me.

I move, sniffing and listening. The low green is soft claws, but higher greens are paws. Many, many paws. Some fallen to the green below. Most hold to brown arms that hold to the tall brown things. Arms? A new thought.

I thirst and return to the cold wet. I drink. Odors come, some strange. A long thing wiggles near the wet. I watch but do not pounce. It slips into the wet. Was it food?

Will food be in the place where I sleep? Hungry now. I return to that place with no need to sniff.

No food is there, but another scent. The scent is like mine, but darker. Stronger. I have smelled this before.

I face the bright entrance, watching things move through the blue without touching green or brown.

Sometimes these land on the brown limbs clinging to the tall brown things. Soon they rise again into the blue. Their arms are wide and flat, and move fast. I stretch and look down. I, too, have arms but none so wide. I move my front ones quickly, but do not rise. As I move them, something I cannot see pushes my fur.

I return to the bright, trot almost to the cold wet, and sit. Now something stirs my fur while I do nothing. Hunger returns, and I hunt softly on the green and between the tall brown things.

Something gray with large eyes jumps from a green mound to land nearby. It sees me, makes noise, and leaps away. I chase but cannot catch. Is all food faster than me? No. Food in my sleeping place is so slow it stays still.

I see more tiny things that hum. Flat arms like the larger things high above. Only these arms move so fast that they do not seem to move. I jump and catch one in my mouth, but spit it out. Bitter.

A green paw lands near me, and I sniff it. Not food. The blue above is darker, and I return to the sleeping place. Yes! Food! Eat. I yawn and lie down and close eyes. Then I seem to run while a gray thing is trying to escape me. I make a great leap and bring it down, biting its neck. I begin to eat but open my eyes. I am not standing on fresh meat. I am in the sleeping place. My eyes close.

Day 4:

I awake and stretch. I freeze. Fear! Something is here with me! It, too, has fur, legs, and tail, but is large enough to hunt me. It somehow stands on only two legs. It makes soft noises. Haven’t I have heard such noises before?

I move backward and crouch. It does not follow, but makes more noises and then departs. I watch it move into the light outside. Its middle shifts. It drops to the ground and runs off on four legs. Those noises it made, they cling to my ears. I almost—no, I cannot reach.

My trembling stops. I go outside. Everything is familiar but different. From nowhere, names arrive. The blue above is sky, and the white shapes clouds. That blaze I ignore because it hurts my eyes is the sun. I know these things but do not understand them. More names pour into my thoughts.

Tints reveal themselves, pulled from simple colors. Now they claim separateness as orange and pink, turquoise and violet, many others.

Beauty! Everywhere. Has the world changed or have I?

Gazing all around, I return to the cold wet and find it to be a stream. Water! I drink my fill then trot along the bank until I reach a still lake. At the edge, I gaze downward. The water reflects sky, clouds, and some winged creatures above. Beneath, small creatures scaled in silver and gold fly on gauzy wings. I watch. My shadow shifts so very slowly. I become dizzy and must lie down.

I rest my eyes, and when I open them, the sky has darkened and is edged with red of many tints. I feel hunger and... what? I run toward my sleeping place and a new name arrives: cave. My cave.

Food again? I smell it before I reach the opening. My mouth wets from hunger.

Another leap brings me to the food, and my jaws open wide, but I am more than jaws, and I close them again. What is this food? Where did it come from? The sun spits red rays into the cave. My food rests within a circle with raised walls. The light fades, but I have seen. This food is brown with something white in it. A word comes: meat, but no word comes for the white.

I will not eat yet, although I do not know why not. I back up and settle myself near one side of my cave. I close my eyes partway and wait.

Distant sounds arrive along with new words: forest, tree, glade. I hear something approaching on soft paws. I sniff quietly. A large creature on four legs enters my cave. Its middle shifts, and it stands upright. It is too dark to see clearly, but the harder I try, the more I see although the sun has not returned. This being’s scent reminds me of that other, larger intruder. I sense it watching me and close eyes tightly.

Strange noises. I partly open one eye. Something small and square rests on the ground, and the noises come from it. I listen, but the sounds mean nothing.

The creature makes soft noises of its own, pushes the food closer to me, and departs. I am very hungry and must eat. I do, but before I have filled myself, I become so tired that my eyes close.

Day 5:

“By now,” a soft voice said, “you might understand a little of what I’m saying.”

Bright, my cave, and the bigger creature had returned. I wasn’t as afraid.

“Don’t expect you’ll be talking yet, but if you’re getting any of this, just lower your head a little.”

I tilted my head, not certain why I had.

“Great! You’re making real progress. Liana tells me that you refused to eat at first. Impressive,
assuming you didn’t have a stomachache. If you guessed about the soporific, soon you’ll be teaching us. I see you looking at the soundsource cube. You got a late start to your sleep-training last night, so we let the program run later as well. I’ll take it away along with your dish, and Liana will be back tonight with food and the next program. Now watch me carefully.”

Those noises meant little to me, but not nothing, and they came with a flavor of friendliness that warmed me. The creature moved close to me, held a paw near my eyes, and turned the paw to show the same thick claws that I had, only larger. Then these bottom claws opened and wiggled.

“Fingers. You’ve got ’em too, but using them will take practice. Keep watching. First I slip my backpack off and open it.” The creature pulled a large lump off its back that I’d thought part of its fur.

“I pick up the cube with one paw and put it in the pack. Now I grab your dish and tuck that away. I close the pack and return it to my back. Try any of that without fingers!”

I turned a front paw over and tried to open the thick claws. I couldn’t.

“Don’t worry, it’ll come. Just a matter of finding the right muscles and developing them. So long for now, and I’ll join Liana tonight when she visits you. Little one, trust me. You’ll be one of those to make it, I’m counting on you.”

Thick claws—no, fingers—folded, back on all fours, the creature bounded from my cave.

The creature’s noises echoed in my mind and I tried to repeat them. Sounds came out of me, but not the right ones. I tried again to open my fingers, gave up, and trotted outside.

The world startled me. So many more details and textures. So lovely that I couldn’t keep from making sounds, each gently squeezing my chest.

I’d always traveled downhill from here, but now I trotted uphill. Curiosity. After a long climb, I came upon more tall things— trees!—not all brown. Some had white coverings or gray or markings in different colors. Their... leaves were mostly green but some were red or yellow. The land became steep and then steeper. Looking back, I could hide the lake behind one paw.

Soon, a feeling came over me to go no further, and I turned around. From here, nothing looked familiar.

I am here, but where is here? And what am I?

Troubled, I worked my way far, far down to the lake. No sky reflections now; tiny waves shook the surface. Still, the sun-sparkling water soothed me. Perhaps I could drink here as I did from the stream. I tried, but the taste was bad. No matter, I would drink later.

Later? Since when did I understand later and earlier? The question brought other words into focus: today, yesterday, tonight. Weren’t these pieces of something larger? I wasn’t sure.

I lay so still that a small animal with green leaf-shaped spots didn’t notice me. It even jumped over my tail in its rush to reach the water. Six legs, so I knew it lived in trees. Four limbs for ground-dwellers, six for arboreals, eight for flyers.

Where had I learned that rule? And it wasn’t true. I’d seen flying creatures with double sets of wings, two thin legs and two thin arms, but others with two wings and two legs.

The creature lowered its speckled head and lapped the lake water with a long tongue. I stirred, and it squeaked and scrambled away.

Again I made chest-squeezing sounds. Delicious.

Far from shore, a bump rose into the air, dripping. No cause for alarm until it kept expanding as more of some enormous animal surfaced. The monster floated, then sank under. It appeared again, much closer to me, and I backed away from the lake. A long mouth opened. Many teeth. A huge golden eye fixed on me, and then the creature turned and dived away at great speed. I glimpsed a massive tail covered with thin claws. Ripples spread out, higher than the little waves.

Shaking, I trotted to the stream, ended my thirst and roamed the forest until I found a bright patch of sun-warmth. There, I rested. To one side, a path with interesting odors led toward an unknown area. As I calmed, I thought: why not see where this trail led?

If a lake giant had been afraid of me, what could I have to fear?

The trail did not flow straight but as if stalking, wound around trees and large boulders. I followed it until I came upon tall bushes bearing truly strange leaves, some blue and others clear with flashing colors within where sunlight touched them. The air felt thin here, holding scents that made my nose itch. I sneezed.

What felt right was returning to my part of the forest. This I did and at speed. Once there, I found a glade, lay down and allowed my eyes to shut. My latest unease faded, but questions arose that I could not answer.

I opened my eyes to twilight and returned home. Food waited there, but nothing else, including the noise-making thing. I waited, listening. Nothing happened so I ate.

Day 6:

Awakening, much in me had changed. Many new words had appeared, but more than words. Now I understood the concept of concept. I was a new me, a me who could think about thinking, aware of awareness. Before I opened my eyes, my nose told me I wasn’t alone.

Both previous visitors were resting on haunches not far from me, both regarding me with large green eyes.

“Can you understand me a bit more?” voiced the bigger one.

I tried to make the right word but only growled. Still, I remembered head-nodding yesterday to show comprehension, so I did that.

The smaller creature made a pleased sound. The bigger one spoke. “Fantastic! At this rate, you’ll be talking any day now. Do you know what it means to have a name?”

No.

The creatures glanced at each other, and then the smaller one spoke.

“You do know what a word is?”

Nod.

“A person’s name is a word that identifies that person as apart from another. We three are of one kind, but my name is Liana. I am female. When speaking about a female, you can use ‘she’ or ‘her’

instead of her name; she did this, give it to her. This is Ares, a male. The words ‘he’ and ‘him’

similarly follow males. What belongs to a female is hers. What belongs to a male is his. You are not yet female or male, but if you pass all Four Gates, you can someday choose to be one or the other.

You, too, will have a name. But the one you’ll soon remember won’t be yours.”

I understood—she or her—words, but not whatever she meant them to shape. I tilted my head to show response that wasn’t a nod.

The Ares spoke. “Don’t worry. We don’t expect you to understand much at this point. Some of your confusion is caused by the way we’re teaching you, and how our kind came to be. For now, you are safe and cared for. You have already passed the First Gate, and well ahead of the pack! You will face other Gates as they come. Try your best to understand me: This evening when you return here, eat right away. The food will make you sleep and sleep will help you learn.”

Nod.

“Excellent! I’ll see you again tomorrow morning. Liana?”

“I’ll be here too. Grow and be well, little one.”

Side-by-side, they trotted from my cave. Their words seemed to echo around me, but no matter how I turned each ear, I couldn’t make the meanings clearer.

I moved close to a wall and stretched out, reaching as high as I could. I kept pushing forward to get higher until I stood only on my back legs with my front legs against the wall. Could I reach even higher? I tried and felt my back break. No! It hadn’t broken, just changed shape. I felt fear but no pain.

I pushed away from the wall, standing as the Ares and the Liana stood! Keeping my balance wasn’t easy, and when I tried moving one leg at a time, I fell. Still, this accomplishment delighted me.

Resting on my haunches like the big ones, I lifted a front paw and looked at the underside. The thick claws still wouldn’t open, but I pushed them with my tongue and felt where they were connected deep inside my paw. Instead of trying to move the claws, I tried moving the connection and... the claws opened! Not far, but I had the right scent.

I returned to the wall and forced myself upright again. My back shifted, but now I expected it.

Strange, though. I tried moving one leg again and kept balanced a little longer. A word came to me, walking. I was trying to walk. As I fell, I felt my back snapping into its proper place.

Outside, the sun called to me, and my cave seemed too dark and damp. Good things were happening! I could stand and almost open my claw-fingers. What would I be able to do tomorrow?

Feeling that the sun had filled my body, I ran to the lake. Bring on giants with teeth! Nothing could daunt me today.

Day 7:

When I awoke, the sun had barely risen. Both creatures were here, whispering. Their words fell into my mind with a new clarity, and I knew they were arguing.

“I’m afraid this one,” the Liana said, “is coming along too fast. The kitten may be facing the Fourth Gate before developing scruples. I think we should titrate the dosage.”

“I don’t. Really, Li, have you seen aggressiveness here? Any meanness? We expect children to be self-absorbed; they need that for fast learning. Yes, our student will need to grow a conscience, but there’s enough time.”

“I’ll trust your judgment for now,” the Liana whispered so quietly that I strained to hear. That was a mistake.

“See that ear turn, Ares? Our student is awake.”

I sensed they were distressed that I’d overheard, some alteration in body posture and scent informed me. Much to think about.

Ares, then, not the Ares. Just Liana. Another thing learned. The male eyes watched me as his muzzle-whiskers twitched. “Whatever you heard, try to ignore it for now. Today will be a different kind of day. Nod if you understand.”

I tried to say “yes.” To my joy, a sound came from me that wasn’t completely wrong.

“By the Giver, was that a yes?”

This time I nodded.

“Wonderful! Thought it might be a burp. Try more words. Keep it simple. Maybe up, down, yes, and no.”

I tried, and noises came out. Ugly ones. How did these two do this with such ease?

“That’s not bad, considering. It will come. As I said, today will be different. Liana and I will journey with you wherever you go and teach you things you’ll need to know. We’ll get started after you relieve yourself.”

Relieve myself? I guessed what Ares meant but had never paid attention to such things any more than I paid attention to breathing. And why relieve myself now rather than during my journey?

Strange.

Then stranger yet, I remembered standing before a very large white bowl, so smooth it glistened.

It held a small pool of water, and water was pouring out of me and running into the pool. The memory faded.

I’d never seen such things and yet...

Confused, I went to the forest to “relieve” myself and be alone. But now I was more aware of the process, and new questions arose. It seemed that confusion could track me anywhere. I returned, and we all left together.

Liana did most of the instructing. “This forest,” she said as we moved along, “is near an edge of Arden Three, one of ten such areas. Long ago, the Reformers used their skills and machines to transform natural plants and animals into those that survive here today.”

Her words left me desperate to ask questions, but I had no way express my feelings.

“Our kind, too, was transformed. We have always been team hunters, always clever. Yet before we were changed, we had no fingers, no true speech, and could not easily stand. The Reformers gave us... ourselves. We honor them and one among them most of all.

“Our transformation brought us great gifts and great losses. We cannot remain healthy outside these forests, yet cannot create more Ardens or expand any until we have mastered Reformer skills ourselves. Our benefactors left our ancestors technology and much instruction, but our ancestors had not achieved enough... dexterity to use the technology nor wisdom enough to preserve all instructions.

Are you following this?”

I bobbed my head but at an angle, hoping Liana would understand.

She did and sounded pleased. “You comprehend some. That’s all I could hope for.”

Ares said only one word, “Population,” before letting Liana resume. When she did, her voice sounded less happy.

“I’m sorry, little one. I must speak of our greatest loss. The Ardens are vast, but tiny compared to lands we could roam before our transformation. A growing population would require far more. Our food supply is limited, forcing us into terrible sacrifices.”

She fell silent. I felt a chill. Why had she stopped teaching?

Perhaps she smelled my urgency. “I shall speak more about this tomorrow. For now, listen carefully.”

She shifted to an upright posture, walking on two legs without slowing. “First the concepts left and right. This is my left hand, this is my right. Is that clear?”

Nod.

“This direction, then, is to my left because it is closer to my left hand than to my right hand.”

Nod.

“Splendid. To my right side then, we come to a brown maple, a tree from the Reformers’ world, modified to survive here. To my left a new birch almost touches that smaller goldenrock, a native tree. Notice vines growing on the goldenrock’s bark, intertwining upwards. These are not parasites but symbiotes, vital to much native flora.”

I tried to speak but couldn’t vocalize while walking. So I tried something else....

“Yes, small one, I see your head moving in circles. We don’t expect you to understand ‘parasites’

or ‘symbiotes,’ but you will. To continue, ahead we have a...”

I listened and learned, each name striking a word already within me with an impact I could almost hear. Liana finished speaking of trees and smaller plants, and stopped. She lifted her arm and raised a single thick claw... finger.

“What I’m doing with my hand, small one, is pointing. Imagine this finger as a nose aimed directly toward a scent. Look in the direction the scent would be coming from. That’s right. Now I point at the sky, so look at the sky.”

I did but saw nothing more than the clouds and some winged creatures.

“Animals of several different orders can fly,” Liana said. “The one above you now is of a kind that evolved on the Reformers’ planet, a ‘bird,’ modified of course. All birds on our world fly and their wings and bodies are covered in light fronds known as ‘feathers.’ Each bird species has a name, and the one that just flew by is a ‘swallow.’ Ares?”

“Liana wants me to talk about the native creatures up there, my special area of interest. Notice how steadily they soar compared to the birds. More wings permit faster, shorter wings, thus less, ah, bounce through the air. My main work is designing machines that may someday fly over land and sea while carrying people. The Reformers used such machines on their home world, but my designs follow the structures of native flyers.”

The word “sea” reminded me of seeing a sparkling expanse of blue-green far below. Where could I have seen this? Confused, I barely listened while Ares spoke of tilt-wings and stretch-wings and bobbles. We’d reached the lake when I realized that he’d already fallen silent.

“It seems,” Liana said, “that you’ve had all the instruction you can absorb for today, but pay attention just a bit longer. This is Lake Gunder, named by a Reformer, and even larger than it appears from here since that spit of land”—she did a pointing—“hides where it curves beyond our sight. It’s very deep and home to many swimming creatures including some big predators. These are hunters, eaters of smaller creatures. You need not fear these because they will avoid you.”

“Should we tell our student why?” Ares said.

“No.”

“What harm could it do?”

“Who knows? But knowledge should follow memory, not the other way around.”

Ares stared at Liana. At first he seemed angry, but the anger faded. “Perhaps I’ve become overeager. Suddenly I fear we will never complete the training in time.”

“Never,” Liana said, “had best come early this year. Keep your ears forward, engineer! Recently you had faith I lacked. Now let me share mine with you. Come, let us leave our student for the balance of today. You and I need to reach some agreements. Little one, you are on your own for now.”

Returning to all-fours, my teachers vanished in an instant. I wandered to the stream and sat close to the water.

I had to learn how to talk! So many things I needed to ask, but at the least I had to master the simplest words. I decided to stay here until I’d consistently produced “yes,” “no,” “what,” and

“why.”

Hard. Grunts and squeals? Yes. Groans and one startling whistle? Done. But only “yes” came out clearly. I closed my eyes to recall the teachers’ faces and remembered how their lips moved as they talked.

I made more sounds while moving my own lips. Changes, but not enough. Thirst came. I drank then returned to practicing. As I made noises, I moved my tongue to pull back wetness remaining in
my mouth and heard a big difference. Speaking used the tongue! The instant I discovered this, it came to me that I’d already known it. A dizzying wave of confusion passed through me, leaving no clarity behind.

Armed with new or newly recalled knowledge, I vocalized again while experimenting with tongue and lip movements. Darkness had fallen before I felt satisfied with my little words, but I hurried home warmed by pride. Tomorrow I would surprise the visitors!

Day 8:

I awoke before the sun did. The box lay near me, emitting words and sentences that I mostly understood. Today I recognized that these words were in two languages, Nynorsk and English. How could I know such things? Was this object teaching me? Or... reminding me? Then I remembered something wonderful: my name.

Arvid. Arvid Lund.

There. In the mirror. Wild blond hair and a trimmed blond beard. Wide cheeks with a ruddy tint, wide jaw, blue eyes, thick eyebrows.

Muscular forearms with a light coating of redblond hair—

I glanced at my arms. Gray fur with brown streaks.

What had Liana said about my name? When I found it, it would not be mine? Almost... almost I understood, the knowledge lay just beyond my claw-reach, but then a whirlwind of confusion drove it away.

Practice speaking, I told myself and ignore memories of that which never happened.

“No. Yes.” Good. So much better it seemed worth trying to vocalize my teachers’ names. On

“Liana,” the “L” wasn’t happening, likewise the “R” in “Ares.” “Awes” wasn’t pleasing me, although yesterday I would’ve leapt from joy at coming that close.

Perfection always retreats as we approach it. I remembered saying just that to—impossible! I couldn’t produce most of those sounds until today.

I worked on the “L.” Altering my mouth shape barely helped. But experimenting with my tongue, I found that lifting the tip to the roof of my mouth gave me “L,” and curling it slightly produced a fair

“R.” Meanwhile, I only bit my tongue twice but learned that words could certainly hurt.

When my teachers arrived, I greeted each by name although in my eagerness, my words weren’t as clear as they’d sounded a short while before. Still, their response was all I could’ve wanted. Ares made a noise of pure joy then stood upright and lifted me off the ground with unfurled fingers, twirling me around before setting me down while Liana kept repeating, “Well done!”

“Today,” Ares said, “you have passed through the Second Gate, and splendidly. You continue to astonish.”

Liana sat beside me, her body pressed against my side. “Try to share your thoughts and feelings.

Take your time, there’s no hurry.”

I nodded. “Why do I”—slow going and my words were fuzzy—“Arvid Lund?”

As a complete sentence that wasn’t success, but my listeners seemed to understand.

Liana chose to answer. “So you’ve already reached that point. Ares, we do have a prodigy.”

“Have I not said so?”

“Have I denied it?” She returned attention to me. “You have had and will continue to have flashes of Lund’s memories. All our kind living in the Ardens has these experiences to some degree.”

“Why?” Nice and clear.

She uttered a soft cry. “We have been given a great gift, but at a terrible cost. We will tell you, but not yet. What say you, Ares?”

“I agree.”

“Good. Little one, you have found the wrong name so would you like one of your own?”

My own? I forgot my disappointment at not learning more about Lund.

“Name! Please.”

Liana made noises like fast breathing but with voice added to it. I’d made that sound myself, and now I had a word for it: laughter.

“Today, kitten, you’ve learned a new trick. Politeness. Soon you’ll be saying thank you, and kindly pass the salt.” Both my teachers laughed.

“Name?” I said.

“Until you select one for yourself,” Liana said, “yours will be Arlie. We chose a genderfree name similar to Arvid. Acceptable?”

Couldn’t she see me glowing with pleasure? I had too much to express to say anything more than

“Yes.”

“Splendid.” She stood up. “Ares?”

“Today,” he said, “we begin your training in fighting and defense. Why not warm our fur in the sunrise while we work? Come.”

I followed my teachers outside, trying to phrase a complex question with simple words.

I did my best. “Why fight when all animals flee?” My “F”s sounded like a weak wind, and trying to rapidly put “F” and “L” together failed miserably.

Yet Ares understood. “Yesterday, Arlie, you learned that our species must live within the Ardens.

Our food is limited, as are desirable places to build homes. There are seventy-five thousand of us. Do you understand seventyfive thousand?”

“I... do.” Surprise. His mention of a specific number evoked strange knowledge in me. I remembered how to count. But why?

“Arlie, this is vital. If birth is unchecked, our people will soon compete for basic necessities. Our society, basically an enhanced aspect of our natural hunting methods, will vanish and no one will have time to replenish our... teaching materials. Then we’ll lose all we’ve gained and never join the Reformers as fellow travelers to the stars.

“Little one, you must learn painfully sharp truths. Limited to such a small area on our world, we are vulnerable to natural disasters. So while we cannot let our population rise, we dare not let it fall.

Only substantial numbers may allow us to repopulate after calamity. We must reproduce. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” His voice carried an apologetic tone that worried me.

“But when our people give birth, we have litters: three to six children every time. The Reformers knew this, but didn’t consider the implications when they modified our original forms. Do you see our problem, Arlie?”

“I—what... do... do—” I gave up.

“Patience. Every mated pair of adults is required to have two children accepted for citizenship during their lifetimes, but more are usually forbidden. Our antifertility techniques are excellent, but producing at least one litter is compulsory.”

He glanced at Liana before continuing. “I’m oversimplifying but it brings us to the crux. For our survival, we cannot allow every child to live. This is our torture and our main reason to create more

Ardens.”

Fear made talking even harder. “How?” was all I could manage.

“To establish merit, each child must pass four tests, the Four Gates. Few succeed. Children who fail are put to sleep and never wake up. They do not suffer but we do. Grief is the terrible price we pay.”

Ares lowered his head, and Liana took over.

“To pass the First Gate, a child must exhibit some comprehension of an association between vocalized sounds—words—and meaning. Opening the Second Gate requires a child learning to vocalize words themselves. You have done both. The final Gates await those who develop... certain qualities, as you have. The Third involves competition; the Fourth requires battle skills.” She turned toward Ares. “Ready to continue?”

He raised his head, gazing into my eyes in a way that evoked a feeling in me I couldn’t name. But I remembered sitting with my grandmother near the cliff’s edge behind her cottage, gazing down at ocean waves flowing over half-submerged boulders while hammering larger ones, blasting white spume high into the clean air. To my left, fireplace smoke from the little fishing village within easy walking distance played counterpoint to the fountains of spray, and I realized that my grandmother’s shawl couldn’t be keeping her warm enough. I suggested we go inside, and she looked at me with such—

The memory thinned to nothing, like the smoke I’d never seen as Ares resumed.

“Your next Gates demand agility and speed. Battle training improves both. We didn’t expect you to advance so far nearly this soon, so Liana and I need to prepare a training site before we begin. We will return when everything is ready. Li?”

My teachers bounded away as though something hungry were chasing them. Was death chasing me? Competition and fighting? Children being put to death who didn’t qualify? Horrible things to learn, and I longed for the carefree innocence of yesterday. My life seemed far too brief to end so soon.

I waited.

My teachers didn’t return to my cave but called to me from the forest’s edge. I joined them there, slowly, my body heavy with dread.

With a head gesture, Ares told me to follow as they moved between the trees, more silently than I could. We veered in a long rightward curve and stopped in a meadow I’d never visited.

A stream flowed close by, perhaps connected to the one I knew, and a few tall boulders reminded me of those in the sea near my grandmother’s cottage in Norway. Short grass softened the ground, the top of every blade flat and glistening. A word and its meaning came to me: “mowed.” I couldn’t imagine how this had been done, but it resulted in a fair-sized flat area.

Ares moved to its center. “Come closer to me, Arlie. Stop. First, we’ll practice defensive side-leaps. We have three basic side-leaps: simple, twisting, and flipping. These can be high or low, and can include a block or attack. We begin with the simple. I will leap toward you and try to strike you with a paw. My claws will be sheathed, but you will not enjoy being hit. Your task is to gauge my leap and avoid it by jumping directly to the side. If I come at you with my left paw, jump to your right.

Otherwise, I could immediately rake you with my right paw. And the reverse with a right paw attack.

Is that clear?”

It wasn’t, but he immediately galloped directly at me and sprang. It hurt when his paw struck my side. It hurt a lot.

“Your mistake,” he said when I’d stopped rolling around in pain, “wasn’t acting too slowly. You
leapt prematurely and gave me time to adjust my angle of attack. Timing is crucial.”

Pain was such a familiar experience. Yet when had I ever been injured? This added confusion to another kind of pain. Ares had hurt me. Intentionally! I felt—I couldn’t find the word.

Ares lifted a paw, showing no front claws. “I’m sorry, Arlie. Believe me, I know what you’re feeling because I’ve been through this myself. You feel betrayed.”

That was the word.

“This teaching is cruel and if we had more time, we might find a kinder way. But reaching your developmental stage, students are only allowed a few days to prepare for competition against other children at a similar level. You’ll be the youngest in your group, and some will never reach the Fourth Gate. Remember, you’ll need fighting skills to pass the final test. This is death or life, and we dare not coddle you. Now watch carefully. Liana will attack me as I attacked you. Observe everything.”

In an instant, Liana went from resting on the ground to flying through the air in a flash of gray and brown. I saw no way for Ares to avoid being struck, but he jumped sideways the tiniest instant before the collision, and landed safely a claw length from Liana’s outstretched paw.

Ares gazed at Liana and briefly lowered his head. He turned toward me.

“Did you notice,” he asked, “how fast she was?”

“Yes.” How could I have missed it?

“Among our kind, males are generally larger than females and our forelegs stronger. Females are usually faster and have stronger back legs. These are some factors to consider when you decide your gender.”

“But I am...” I struggled to express the concept “... already male.”

Liana laughed. “No, kitten, but we all think that at your age. Reformer Lund was male, but you are not Lund.”

“Even if you choose a sex,” Ares added, “the part of you that observes all your experiences, the truest part of you, never has gender.”

“If I choose?”

Ares made a noise, a quick hiss. “I have said too much. We must focus on your training. I will rush you again, a little slower. Avoid my attack.”

I wasn’t ready, but this time the pain wasn’t as bad because only the edge of his paw had hit me.

“Better, but this time you waited overlong. You need a clear sense of an aggressor’s reach. When I leap, my body and arms stretch out. Your timing must depend on the attacking rather than the resting shape of your opponent. Once again, faster!”

This time his paw merely brushed my fur. A warm and unexpected feeling of accomplishment filled me, fed by praise from both teachers.

The practice session stretched on until the sunrays flowed between tree trunks like water.

Periodically, we all drank from the nearby stream. This was hot and thirsty work, and bruising. But I learned from my mistakes and wasn’t hit truly hard again. When my skill at simple side-jumps had improved enough, Ares began to instruct me in twisting variations, which made me feel that I was starting from scratch.

When twilight arrived, Liana announced that I’d learned enough for one day. She told me to return home, and she’d soon bring food.

“Beginning tomorrow,” she said, “you will eat two meals daily. Training is arduous, and we do not want you losing weight. Also, you are entering a time when a growth spurt is expected, and extra nutrients are needed.”

I wondered about the source of my food, which led to an extraordinary thought, which led to an
extraordinary question. But I couldn’t talk well enough to ask it. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Back home, a wave of exhaustion felled me. Hunger kept screaming, but what I most wanted was sleep and lots of it. So I wasn’t surprised to find that I’d fallen asleep after Liana woke me with some gentle licks near my eyes.

The sun had just set, and the red edge of its passing cast enough light for me to see a new, larger food bowl on the floor next to the returned speech box. “Eat as much as you can. Then go back to sleep,” Liana commanded.

The bowl overflowed with good smelling meat. How could I eat even half of it?

She seemed to read my mind. “You don’t have to gobble all that at once, Arlie.” She laughed. “Eat some, rest, and then have more. The drug to make you sleep is near the bottom. Even if you can’t finish it all, try to get as many of those white granules into you as possible.”

She departed and I walked to my bowl and examined the food. So many white specks covered the surface that it reminded me of my childhood in Bergen and those little pellets of snow that would—
no! What childhood in Bergen? What was Bergen? Why did I remember buildings jammed together, resting almost in the ocean’s lap, ships of many kinds like floating sentinels surrounding the peninsula? Why could I see mountains so clearly in my mind’s eye that I knew there were nine?

Faces appeared to me, dear beyond expression, yet alien and frightening.

Filled with troubling, indescribable emotions, I ate every scrap of the food, desperate for the forgetfulness sleep would bring.

Day 9:

I woke to the pattering of rain. The sky through the cave opening wore a coat of gray, spreading sunlight out into a uniform, dim sheet.

“Ares. Liana.” The words emerged clearly. I tested myself with an assortment of words. My speech lacked the smooth ease of my teachers, but it had improved wonderfully. Today, I’d have no trouble communicating. I couldn’t wait until my teachers arrived.

My food bowl had been refilled, although to my relief with not enough meat to satisfy five or six adults. I was surprised to be hungry after last night’s gluttony and found it easy to finish the entire meal.

Liana and Ares shook themselves off just outside my cave, but their fur still dripped as they entered.

“How do you feel?” Liana asked.

“I feel like asking questions.”

She laughed. “Then why wait? And my you’ve gotten good at talking."

“Why is the noise box gone?”

“You no longer need any memory catalyst.”

Yesterday’s extraordinary thought returned. “This world,” I asked carefully, “isn’t named... Jord, is it?”

She and Ares exchanged glances. “You’re right,” she said. “This isn’t Jord. I’m curious, do you know the English word for Jord?”

It came to me instantly. “Earth. But our world has a name?”

“The Reformers called it Skipbrudden. Do you understand?”

Skipbrudden. “I—almost.”

Liana spoke gently. “In English it means ‘Castaway.’ Our benefactors did not plan to spend their lives here, but the machine that carried them through the skies crashed. The Reformers could not repair it. Those among them with such skills died in the accident along with many others.”

“How many lived?”

“Fifteen had already arrived safely. Four more survived the impact, but one soon died.”

A vision, more painful in its way than any blow from yesterday’s practice, appeared. I saw a slender woman with amber hair and an elfin face smiling at me, love profound in her eyes, and then I saw her bleeding in my arms—no, in my arm. The unbroken one...

I couldn’t bear it and forced myself back to the present. “The Reformers,” I said, strain obvious in my voice, “were not of our species.”

“True, they were ‘humans.’ Menneskeleg.”

Suddenly, I felt near the brink of great discovery. “Then what species are we?”

“One of the first humans who found us named our ancestors Skogkatts, after a favored animal from his world. We believe that wild Skogkatts still thrive beyond the Ardens. But Arvid Lund, the Giver, provided a new name to those hundreds of us he transformed. You and I and Ares are Tregul,

‘tree gold,’ treasures of the forests.”

“But why transform us?” A more troubling question came to me. “And is this change why we are...

restricted to the Ardens?”

She studied me before answering. “Your progress is so rapid, perhaps you could answer those questions yourself.”

“How would that be possible?”

“Don’t ask how, just ask yourself if you know.”

Instant vertigo tensed my muscles and narrowed my vision. I wanted to growl my denial but couldn’t deny all those visions of a life I’d never had.

Remembering the memories evoked another. My family had just moved to America, pulled across the Atlantic by a research grant offered by Massachusetts General Hospital. My parents were given their own laboratory, staff, free housing, and impressive salaries to continue the genetics work they’d begun in Oslo. I didn’t want to go and be separated from my friends and relatives, particularly my grandmother whom I loved with all my soul. My parents understood my feelings and sympathized, but felt that the potential benefit to humanity outweighed the misery of a twelve-year-old.

I had a terrible first year in Boston. American schools were nightmarish. Some children behaved like vicious animals, and several teachers failed to distinguish language difficulties from stupidity. I regretted my indifference toward mastering English. Next year, I became friends with—

I shut off the memory flood. It made no sense. My body quivered as if drying itself. Maybe this knocked something loose, because an understanding awakened.

“After the crash,” I said slowly, “the Reformers knew they were stuck on a world with too little...

oxygen, and their breathing devices would eventually fail. On Jord, tiny ocean plants produce most of the oxygen, and it is available everywhere. Here, their best hope for survival was to change an entire forest.”

“Just so. Go on.”

I let more truth unroll, learning even as I spoke. “The Reformers discovered our kind and believed we might someday be clearthinking animals like them. But since we seemed so... adapted to the forests...”

“Keep going.”

I looked inward and returned empty. “I can’t.”

“The rest,” Ares said, “should come to you in time. If not, we will tell you. For now, your training takes precedence. Are you stiff and sore this morning?”

“Not much.”

“Then I failed to work you enough yesterday. I, too, have lessons to learn. This day we focus on flip-leaps and techniques for jumping higher. Back to the training area!”

By midday, my energy was spent. Whenever I showed any improvement in skills, Ares made his attacks harder to avoid. Then he had me practice leaping while both of us ran. Liana joined in, and my task became avoiding them rushing at me from different angles. They struck me so often that my biggest challenge became stopping myself from running away to hide.

When I stood trembling on all legs, Ares allowed me a long rest break. After drinking a lake’s worth, I lay down in a patch of sunlight, still breathing fast. Tomorrow, I thought, I’ll have a different answer to those questions about stiffness and soreness.

The hum of insects and distant birdcalls soothed me. I settled into something less than a dream....

After MIT granted me dual undergraduate degrees in bioengineering and microbiology, I asked my fiancée which specialty she thought I should pursue for postgraduate education.

“Why not combine them?” she said.

The suggestion left me uncomfortable. “You mean go into cybercytology?”

She made that little smile of hers and nodded wisely. “Isn’t that where you’ve been heading all along? I know your parents practically invented the field and—”

“Exactly! So where would this—this career choice lead? Either to academia, no thank you, or research, which appeals except there’s only one dedicated laboratory.”

Mischief edged her smile. “Ever noticed how your accent comes out when you’re upset?” She lifted an appeasing palm. “I understand, Arv. I wouldn’t care to work with your parents either. They are... not sure how to put it. Not small-minded or self-centered.”

I let myself be appeased. “What they are, Skye, is driven.”

“Perfect! But think: by the time you’ve got your doctorate, other labs might have identical equipment. Or new options might emerge.”

Good points. “I am interested in cybercyte technology. There’s a crazy idea I’ve been kicking around—”

“Come, little one.” Ares nudged me with his chin. “Rest time is ended, and your trials cannot be postponed.”

That afternoon I learned that I’d only touched the surface of exhaustion in my previous training.

My teachers didn’t let me catch my breath as they leapt at me from so many directions that it seemed there were four of them. When my legs lost all spring, Ares set me to tree climbing, something I’d never tried but which felt natural. Still, it cost me more energy. Strange pleasure, digging claws far into bark. Backing down made me nervous at first. What kept me nervous was Liana stating that during my final test, my opponent could use climbing tactics to pounce from above.

Ares suggested we move on to attack techniques, but Liana disagreed. They went off to settle matters, leaving me on my own. For a time I couldn’t even move and just hoped that the argument would be lengthy.

Finally, moving barely faster than a stretchworm, I worked my way back to my favorite stream, drank, lay down, and discovered that beyond a point, weariness keeps me awake. Leaves of many colors had fallen overnight, and I let my groggy eyes enjoy the patterns they made and tried to forget all about Gates.

Four brown-striped animals downwind from me ran to the water in short, rapid dashes. Two were
almost half my size, surely adults. One was shorter than these but wider, and the final one tiny.

Something nagged at me but wouldn’t come into focus.

Disappointingly but not surprisingly, my teachers easily tracked me. I remembered Tyler Marsh, our team exoecologist, saying, “The nose knows unless the nose flows.” Liana and Ares had arrived silently, yet the striped family dashed away, leaving dry leaves twisting in the air behind them. I shook my head but the false memories remained. Tyler’s bony face remained vivid in my mind. Ty and Bodil had revealed the big discovery, and we—

Bodil? Big discovery? Baffling.

Liana had won the argument, and the rest of the day’s training was practicing jumps until I couldn’t. Night had fallen by the time my teachers let me go home. On the way, I looked up at the stars, now knowing these were suns very far away, giving me a sense of an unimaginably vast ocean of space. I felt tiny and fragile. The big moon had risen, a sliver of light at its edge illuminating my path, but the small moons still hid.

Entering home and smelling food, I wondered how it had arrived since both my teachers had been with me the entire day except for my streamside break. Yet the meat had a fresh aroma. I sniffed but couldn’t smell anything but dinner, and I was ravenous.

Gobbling the entire huge meal proved easy.

Night 9:

A barrage of dreams rattled my sleep.

One wheel on my toy truck squeaked as I pushed it along the rug. I loved that blue truck but hated the squeak. Maybe, a thought came, I could fix this. I’d seen my father oil squeaky machines, so I carried the truck to our kitchen and used a stepstool to reach the olive oil. Before long, an oily pool covered half the kitchen floor, and I was in trouble. But that wheel didn’t squeak....

My mother occupied the passenger seat as I practiced parallel parking, advising without yelling, a skill well beyond my father’s orbit. I finally managed to squeeze into the space, and mother suggested a moment of rest to recuperate from the ordeal. She turned on the radio, and a NRK reporter announced that astronomers stationed on the International Astronomy Satellite had identified seventy more planets with atmospheres and temperature ranges similar to Earth’s, bringing the total to three hundred....

My family watched Craig McGill’s press conference, broadcast from America, on the living room telesense. McGill, captain of the first First Lander Fleet ship to return to Earth, after a journey that began long before my birth, spoke in English with a translation crawling below his image. He mentioned the theory that space-borne biologicals had been the original sources of life on Earth, and Albert Vexler’s prediction that life-forms based on familiar DNA would exist on other planets. He claimed that Vexler’s prophecy had been confirmed in one case....

My wife, Skye-Lynn, forwarded me a report from the nineteenth returned ship, written twenty-some standard years ago but delivered to Earth yesterday. I brushed away one hundred fifty pages to read the summary. The explored planet, labeled IAD 209232034, had promise. DNA life abounded but no truly intelligent life, minimizing ethical issues for exploitation. Low oxygen, however. Animals had evolved to supplement their oxygen-carrying erythrocytes with certain plant spores in an elegant symbiosis. With filtering and extra O2, humans could breathe the air. The FL report recommended a second mission to create conditions for making a permanent colony feasible. This mission would
require scientists and soldiers.

Soldiers?

Day 10:

Don’t want to think about day ten. More training.

Night 10:

One long dream. Skye and I were reading in bed. She enjoying a novel made of actual paper, me working through the report on IAD 2092-32034. Our twenty-pound Norwegian Forest Cat, Torbald, had deposited himself to crush my shins and kept purring to dissuade eviction.

I learned why soldiers were needed. The planet’s animal life had largely proved harmless, in one case friendly. But two species, the amphibious Phobodile and the arboreal Grendel, were lethal.

Three First Landers, despite being well-armed and well-trained, had died from animal attacks before a secure basecamp had been finished. Afterward, the Landers only emerged from their camp in groups of at least four. Before long, they noticed something odd.

I turned toward Skye. “This is interesting.” She hated interruptions when immersed in fiction but humored me. “What is?”

I pointed at my handheld. “Have you read this?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, there’s an animal on that world that’s quite cat-like. Monkey-like tail. One Lander, a fellow Norwegian, named them Skogkatts. What do you think of that, Torbald?” Torbald had nothing to say on the matter.

My wife shrugged. “So far, Arvie, First Landers have found six worlds with terrestrialanalog animals. Something special about these?”

“Ja. Both parents lactate, although the product is closer to fatty blood than milk. They’re team hunters and really clever. They’ll carry fallen branches in their mouths to some suitable spot and stack them to create a barrier. Then working together—”

“Drive their prey into the trap. You’re right. Interesting.”

I smiled. “Haven’t reached the juicy part. Skogkatts turned out to be... cat-curious about the Landers and didn’t try to avoid them, let alone attack them. In turn, the Landers thought the Skogkatts were cute and some even took to feeding them.”

“They tried turning alien animals into pets?”

“Worked pretty well, actually. Now, the weirdness. Sometimes, a hungry Grendel would swing into the basecamp area, and usually it took real effort to chase them away—the Landers wanted to study, not shoot local wildlife. If a visiting monster happened to spot a visiting Skogkatt, the Grendel would do some alien version of lip-licking and setting out the silverware, except some would instantly swing off into the forest, as though the fanden himself were chasing them.”

“Huh. Perhaps the scared ones had been hunted by the alien kitties at some point.”

“Doubtful. I could show you pictures, but not if you hope to sleep tonight. An adult Grendel is Kodiak-bear-sized, with two short legs but four long arms lined with teeth acting like extra sets of jaws. Gigantic bat-style ears. Skogkatts aren’t much bigger than our furry leg-crusher here. They can
climb trees, but why would any Grendel fear them?”

“You say Grendels eat these cat-monkeys?”

“Mostly what keeps Skogkatt numbers in check. The kitties have only one other enemy: Phobodiles. You really don’t want to see those at bedtime. They live in deep lakes, but if they’re hungry enough, they’ll hunt on land. These horrors could bite a rhino in half with a single chomp.

Still, Grendels are apex predators, which makes any of them fearing Skogkatts really bizarre.”

Skye shook her honey-blond head. “A mystery all right. And speaking of mysteries...” She rattled her book, and I let her be.

Day 11:

Better. My body had grown faster and stronger, and today my newly learned attacks weren’t all clumsy. Ares had me running in fast loops around tree trunks, using my claws to tighten turns. Then he had me jumping over boxes of different heights.

Last night’s dream baffled me. The only Phobodile I’d encountered had rushed away. And I’d never even seen a Grendel.

Were these dreams actual memories? As Ares put me through new and progressively harder exercises, such questions seemed less important than breathing and keeping alert for surprise attacks.

“You’re doing well,” Liana said when the sun had reached its daily summit. “At this point, little one, recovery time is as important as training time. Roam wherever you like, slowly, to let your body cool, and then take a nap.” She laughed. “Unless you can’t bear to rest.”

With my chest heaving so much, I waved a paw to deny any unwillingness.

“Later,” Ares added, “we’ll begin working on counters and blocks. Ho! I know your thoughts.

You’ve just envisioned a human arm sweeping sideways to ward off a human fist. Ja?”

I nodded, surprised. He snorted.

“Would that movement be wise against an opponent with claws? Blocks, for us, are done with objects. Certain attacks also rely on objects. Rest now to prepare yourself for the next lessons.”

Lying streamside, listening to the gentle splashes of water flowing over half-submerged rocks, a past experience rose into my mind....

Sipping coffee in our kitchen by a sea-viewing window, feeling trapped, I asked my wife if she really wanted to go.

“Only if you’ll join me,” she said.

“Skye. It would mean a forty-three year investment, in terms of time passing on Earth. Over forty just for travel!”

“Two years travel for us.”

“Still, not trivial. Your skills would be vital, but would mine ever be needed?”

She took a sip, her eyes steady on mine over the cup’s rim. “Cybercytologist is on the list. Arvie, think of how hard it might be to change the trees enough.”

“That’s where you come in.”

She shook her head. “Traditional microbiology might not finish the job. We might need to operate on a... finer scale.”

“Or I could be sitting on my ass watching everyone else work.”

“That’s your real concern?”

“One of them.” I had to be honest. “I love our life here. Why leave our home that we’ve just fixed
up? Or our friends. Or our cat. Ja, I know Lily would take him in a heartbeat, but think. We get back, and Torbald will be long buried and perhaps your sister as well. If we return. No point in sending out rescue missions four decades tardy. And what would we be coming home to?”

She put a hand on mine. “I don’t want to leave either. The idea terrifies me. But isn’t this the proverbial once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? What if some horrible disaster destroys Earth? Imagine us playing a part in saving humanity. Isn’t that worth some big sacrifices?”

A six-winged bug flew by, and I snapped at it half-heartedly. I felt another memory trying to emerge from the back paws of the last one. Some horrible disaster had happened, only not on Earth. I forced the rest away. Still, I felt the pressure....

I was glad when my teachers came to fetch me.

They took me to a place where storm-broken branches littered the ground. Learning to use fingers to pick these up took total concentration. What added extra frustration was clearly remembering swinging such objects. Easily. I kept trying. My arms and shoulders refused to cooperate.

Ares became almost as vexed as me. “No, Arlie! I keep telling you, the idea is to use the branch as a shield, not a weapon.”

One incident interrupted the misery. Liana whispered that Ares and I should stay quiet. We obeyed, and soon, six arboreals swung into the trees not far from our practice area. For a frightening moment, I thought this was my first Grendel sighting, but these were smaller beasts. And while their quadruple arms hinged open for brachiating Grendel-style, I saw no arm-teeth. The wind shifted, and the family caught our scents, leaving behind a faint chorus of mutual warnings as they vanished.

“Good,” Liana said. “I didn’t know their kind still lived in this area.”

“Why good?” I asked.

“It proves that the Reformers managed to—never mind. Back to work, little one! The sun is getting tired.”

Then Ares kept me too busy to ask questions.

Night 11:

In my sleep, memory snippets briefly rose to the surface like the mental equivalent of certain air-breathing fish I’d seen in the lake.

I remembered the shuttle ferrying us to the starship Skidbladnir, to be our home for a subjective year each way. Constructed in space, the vessel was immense for practical and psychological reasons. Put forty-six people in a tin can for a year, you’d better make it a big can if you expect the people to come out sane.

I remembered lovemaking with my wife in the eerie glow of stars seen through a shadowdrive field as displayed in our cabin’s virtual window....

I recalled standing in the ship’s microbiology laboratory with fifteen other specialists. We were working in teams of five, each team with its own 3D image of a hugely magnified real-time manipulation conducted by programmed microbots on alien plant cells. These cells, gathered by First Landers on our destination world along with soil and atmospheric samples, had been brought to Earth for analyses and genome sequencing. Earth was inconceivably distant now, and our joint task required developing a variety of superfast-growing seedlings, which we’d plant on arrival to see which ones showed the most promise for oxygen enrichment.

My expertise wasn’t called for, but Skye had put me on her team to see the specific genetic
changes involved in case cybercyte intervention was eventually needed.

Give me another decade, I thought sadly, and I’d have cybercytes doing every operation displayed on the screen but a hundred times faster....

The next memory seemed harmless at first, like the tip of a Phobodile’s snout poking from a lake.

We’d arrived. The Skidbladnir hadn’t been designed to land on planets. Instead, the ship’s giant-sized longboat would make as many spiraling trips as needed to ferry people and equipment to the chosen basecamp area.

The first trip carried life-domes, six scientists, an MD, three armed soldiers, and three huge conbots to inflate domes and set up atmosphere-enriching gear. The next trip brought food-tanks, medical equipment, two semi-inflatable all-terrain vehicles, and more people....

The full memory surfaced. My shock forced most of it back under, leaving ugly bubbles as reminders of what I’d lost.

The sudden jolt, squeezing me against the safety harness. The twisting. Screams. The unbelievable violence of the crash, tearing my seat off its bolts, sending me flying across the cabin. If it hadn’t flipped in midair, I would’ve been crushed when it hit the wall. Removing the harness, with bones jutting from one arm. Holding my bleeding wife in my usable arm while she died...

I couldn’t endure even these fragments and passed out more than returned to sleep. For a time I drifted, bruised.

Then another dream came as if to comfort me.

Doctor Drew Adams, surgeon and general practitioner, had declared me fit to leave the hospital dome if I remembered to baby my flex-bandaged arm. Feeling nothing but sick and empty, I thanked her and stepped outside into blue-tinged sunlight. A contingent— a bevy? a herd?—of Skogkatts had already made themselves at home, some lazing on the too-green grasses, others draped over crates.

Victor Hornso, a plant geneticist I’d become fond of, and Tyler Marsh, our only surviving exoecologist stood nearby, flanked by two soldiers keeping wary eyes on the nearby trees. When the scientists saw me, they rushed over to offer condolences, which I tried to accept with good grace.

Then I gestured toward the felines. “I’d read that these creatures were friendly, but isn’t this...

odd?”

Tyler nodded so vigorously I’d thought he’d sprain his neck. “When the FL team arrived, Skogkatts were curious about them but cautious. This behavior I can’t explain. Over forty years have passed here since every human left, yet I’d swear these critters recognize us. With fondness! The FL
report claimed that kitties have short lifespans, so none of these could be old enough to remember us.

Besides, this camp is nearly forty kilometers from the old basecamp.”

“Strange.”

Victor snorted. “There’s more. While you’ve been lazing, we got our food-tanks running, and have even harvested a batch of green vegetables. Carrots, starchy veggies, and synthmeat should be ready tomorrow. We were lucky the food-printers came down in the first shipment.”

“Right,” I said, not feeling at all lucky.

“Wait for it, Arv. Three tanks, right? Different shapes. Before we’d even activated the cloning stage, we had kitties hanging around just one tank. Care to guess which one?”

A spark of life in the form of curiosity returned to me. “I see where you’re headed, but wouldn’t synthmeat poison native animals?”

“Possibly. But the same tank can synthesize local proteins. That’s how the First Landers fed their pets.”

“So we’ve got three mysteries now: the two you’ve mentioned and the original.”

Victor looked puzzled, but Tyler understood. “Why some Grendels avoid Skogkatts while others try to have them for dinner.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ll be looking into all that and maybe a fourth mystery. We’ve spotted only one Grendel since we’ve been here, which retreated as soon as it noticed the cats. But they were a constant worry for the FL team.”

“Maybe they never lived in this area.”

“Maybe. Care to help me do some research? The doc released you, so I assume your arm is better.”

“Getting there, Ty. Bones soldered, skin sewn up, and shot so full of quick-heal meds that I can hear the slosh. But like Tyr himself, I’ve got one good arm. What can I do to help?”

Right before I woke up, a bittersweet memory stirred. Everyone had voted and out of pity had elected me to give this world a name. No other survivor had lost a mate. Most couples on board the Skidbladnir had been killed in the crash, having insisted on making the final longboat trip together.

I chose Skipbrudden. Castaway.

Day 12:

Morning. Not so hungry after that kind of night, but my teachers insisted I eat. They added nothing new to my training that day but increased the intensity and gave me two long rest breaks.

Liana made only one personal comment. “You seem... remote, little one. Do you feel we’re pushing you too hard?”

“Bad dreams,” is all I said.

That night I had no dreams I could remember. Perhaps they, too, had become withdrawn.

Day 13:

After I ate and emptied my wastes in the forest, my teachers led me toward the lake, but veered off in a direction that put the sun on our tails. I got the impression they were both anxious, but couldn’t get a claw into why I felt that way.

“Where are we going?” I asked after following an unusually clear trail for a very long time.

Ares answered. “To the road. Almost there.”

Road?

We stopped at the forest edge, and a wide flat surface lay before us. Very disorienting. But not as much as seeing an enormous machine approaching us on this surface, rolling along on huge soft-looking wheels, a Tregul stranger in front, visible behind a clear—a window. It stopped.

“Notice those tanks along the roof,” Liana said. “They allow us to breathe comfortably inside such vehicles. Plenty of oxygen right here, but not everywhere along the route. Five other students will be onboard today, and the tanks are pressurized but only hold so much good air.”

“That’s why,” Ares took over, “only one teacher will accompany each student. Liana and I have decided that I’ll go with you.”

“But what’s all this for?” My voice sounded shrill. “What’s happening today?”

Liana pressed her side against mine. “The Third Gate, little Arlie. Trust yourself and do the best
you can.”

Ares nudged me. “Come, the doors will open as we approach. Make haste.”

Fearful but obedient out of habit, I exceeded my teacher’s pace as we forded the pavement. A door folded open, and I bounded up the steps, Ares on my back paws. The door refolded, and the vehicle began moving. The male Tregul standing behind a large ring— steering-wheel!—glanced at me but showed no further interest. I stared at him, only the third of my kind I’d seen, and the first with orange fur....

“Might as well get comfortable,” Ares said, nudging me along with a light touch of his nose.

“Choose any seat.”

The “seats” were a long series of paired boxes with recessed sitting areas on top. I hopped onto one beside a window and found that it had been padded with something soft. Ares settled into the box next to mine. I stared at the passing scenery, my thoughts whirling.

“We—I mean Tregul... we didn’t built this machine or the road, did we?”

“Yes and no, Arlie. Reformers built the bus, but its motors are powered by methane generated by our septic systems using our techniques. We salvaged the air tanks from the longboat wreckage. Our compressors fill them. As for this surface, you can thank tiny Reformer devices, microbots. Yet we’ve extended the original road greatly using Reformer magnetic dust, which tells the devices where to build.”

Microbots. Yes. I remembered. Conbots were full-scale construction robots. The miniature versions were microbots, used to create artifacts out of their own self-replicating bodies.

With a shock it came to me, a third kind of robot, entirely biological and small enough to travel inside veins and arteries: cybercytes. My life’s work.

I shivered. A dreadful secret lay just beyond claw-reach, or perhaps I didn’t want to reach it....

Softer memories arose of far wider roads, seeming to stretch forever, with great cities like complex, giant crystals visible in the distance. I remembered riding on a mag-lev train, feeling excited. Ten of Norway’s best science students, ages thirteen to fifteen, had been chosen to attend the International Science Symposium, this year held in Stockholm. I was the only thirteen-year-old, having skipped two grades, but my fellow paragons seemed to accept me as one of their own. A collection of eccentrics, we were. The girl next to me wasn’t so much sitting as practicing to be a contortionist, her rainbow-dyed hair shifting colors as...

Ares said, “First stop coming up.” Perhaps this road wasn’t tremendously long. Wouldn’t the Reformers have located all ten Ardens in the same general territory? That seemed much smarter than trying to create them in areas the First Landers hadn’t explored.

Wait. Why ten Ardens? Surely one or two would’ve given them enough actual breathing room.

Did they plan to have children and start a human colony? What had gone wrong? Something warned me not to ask, that I wouldn’t like the answer.

“Here we are,” he announced.

“This is a different Arden?”

Ares didn’t laugh much, but now he did.

“No, little one. Same forest, different part. Every student joining us today has been training in isolated areas of Arden Three, beyond sight and sound of either city.”

“We have cities?”

“Unlike those on Earth. We cannot clear many trees where we hope to breathe, so we build our homes among or in them. Observe! Here’s your first competitor and its teacher. Do not introduce yourself.”

“Why not?”

“It’s considered bad form to know the names of those that may be... put down as the result of one’s success.”

I’d never seen a Tregul child, and the interest was obviously mutual. The student’s coloration fascinated me. Until today, I’d assumed all my kind were gray or brown or a combination. This one had golden fur nearly as shiny and metallic as some lake fish I’d watched in happier days. Its female teacher had similar golden fur. I glanced at my teacher. Brown fur. The exact shade of brown as parts of mine. And Liana’s was gray and brown. Just like mine.

The two strangers revealed their feelings through ear and head positions, and tension around their eyes. Both were anxious but the teacher also seemed sad. She gazed over at Ares, and where I might’ve expected some hint of competitive challenge, all I saw was sympathy.

Before the sun had the chance to stalk much further into the sky, four other students had climbed on board. Two appeared uncertain and fearful, but the final pair carried a hostile scent that shocked me.

Their teachers moved stiffly and wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Both students were much larger than me, one with a shiny green pelt, the other furred in gray and white. Passing down the aisle, gray-and-white banged against the box where the golden-furred student lay. I looked to see if Ares had noticed, and he murmured, “Aggression will not open the Third Gate.” I didn’t miss noticing that, again, the teachers’ fur closely matched their students.

Soon, the driver announced that we’d reached the competition area, and everyone else disembarked. The bus accelerated away, and a Tregul with entirely gray fur led the group through dense forest to a meadow partly obscured by fences of varying heights and large hollow tubes. A wide, grassy trail lay open at both ends of the meadow.

The gray-furred adult rose to stand before us and said, “The first test will be a simple race. You will all line up there, side by side.” She pointed at the wide path to my left. “When I say ‘go,’ run as quickly as you can until you reenter this space from the other side.”

She waited until we were in position and a moment longer. “Go!”

At first we seemed reasonably matched, and I noticed that the trail had been prepared with rough areas and small obstacles to compensate for any advantage to being on the sides. I’d hoped to start on the far right, realizing that reaching the finish line would require more right curves than left ones. The gray-white student shoved me aside to take my favored position, but as we ran it became obvious that more obstacles had been placed on the right.

After we were beyond sight of any teacher, I felt a hard push from my left, and I stumbled, falling behind the green-pelted pusher. Anger put more energy into my legs and I nearly caught up, but thought better of it. Smarter, I figured, to run slightly behind to avoid getting shoved again and then make a last-instant sprint. My golden companion joined me behind the pack, another victim of the green one.

Then I remembered Ares saying that aggression wouldn’t win the day here. Perhaps this race wasn’t intended to test speed and coordination....

The golden student and I crossed the finish line last. Catching Ares’s eye, I sensed his approval, which boosted my confidence no end. From then on, through the many tests that followed, I tried hard but remained careful to avoid interfering with any other competitor. The two aggressive students performed the best, but whenever I glanced at their teachers, they seemed more frantic despite trying to hide it.

The challenges continued into the late afternoon, and I was exhausted when the vehicle returned to pick us up. No one spoke during the entire trip. Ares and I were last to be dropped off, and Liana waited for us at the forest edge.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Passed the Third Gate, tail flying.” The joy and pride in his voice amazed me. I hadn’t realized how much he cared.

Liana practically glowed with happiness. I was glowing myself. It seemed I’d be waking up in the morning.

Day 14:

I yearned for a day of rest before resuming training.

“Now,” Ares said, “you’ll learn how to kill Treguls.”

It took a moment to realize I was sputtering in my native Norwegian, and longer to remember that Norwegian wasn’t exactly my native language.

I studied Ares but learned nothing from the set of his whiskers or the tilt of his head.

“Why?” I finally asked.

Liana answered. “The Fourth Gate, I’m sorry to say, is a fight to the death between two candidates who’ve passed the Third.”

I felt too horrified to even sputter. Was I supposed to fight and kill my golden friend from yesterday? Or the green-furred aggressive one?

Gently, Liana stroked a soft paw across my back. “We’ve been unlucky to draw the particular opponent you’ll be facing tomorrow.”

Tomorrow?

“This student,” she continued, “is... unusual. Larger and stronger than anyone from yesterday’s group. You’ll have to be smarter and faster.”

So I wouldn’t be facing golden or green fur. Probably foolish, but I felt so much relief it freed my voice.

“Who else in my group passed?” Please, let it be golden fur.

Ares, who’d been standing, dropped to all fours. “Only two failed. I imagine you know which two never developed Lund’s empathy, but rather the more... selfish aspects of human nature. Let’s get to work. First step, claw shaping techniques.”

An ugly day it was. Liana taught me the craft of using rocks to get the very tips of my claws needle-sharp, although I’d never seen a needle. If too much claw were thinned, it could break off in battle. Ares set me to slashing low-hanging branches with fore and rear paws while jumping from different directions. Then he demonstrated various deathstrokes and had me try those on him with sheathed claws. I learned that fingers could have emergency uses in a fight aside from lifting objects as shields. A quick, hard tug on a tail could briefly disable an opponent, or turn them to allow a claw attack.

My heart wasn’t in it, but my teachers took my bad attitude with good grace.

At noon, they let me relax. I wandered to my favorite streamside spot and drifted off. As if to make up for this nasty turn in my life, a pleasant dream soothed me.

My mother and I sat in bed, she reading a favorite book to me about a little black girl who had magic powers, but only when it rained. I identified with that girl with all my young heart. Like her, I was small for my age and had been uprooted from a cozy little town where most of my relatives lived and transplanted into a metropolis, in my case Oslo. I, too, was considered odd by my new classmates, too smart for my own good, and an intellectual showoff. Her race and gender meant
nothing to me. The only real difference between us, I thought, is that I’m not magical, not even in the rain. Rain! An association triggered another memory so energy-charged that my eyes snapped open and my fur partly stood on end.

I’d been sitting outside on a chair I’d crafted from local lumbar, suspecting an upcoming drizzle and watching Skogkatt kittens at play. Then I saw two of my favorite people sprinting up the gentle slope to my dome, the security guard responsible for them huffing away, trying to keep up with the older folks. I watched with interest, having never seen Bodil Christophersen run, and hadn’t thought Tyler Marsh still capable of it.

They practically screeched to a stop in front of me, and I looked from face to face, and then to face as the guard, Daniel Connor, caught up.

I smiled. “Exciting news?”

Tyler’s expressing turned slightly rueful. “Bo solved it.”

Bodil brushed her hair back. “But Ty proved it.”

“Tremendous,” I said. “I couldn’t be more pleased. Unless, of course, someone would tell me what got solved.”

Tyler chuckled. “The mysteries, Arv. What else?”

I caught some of their enthusiasm. “Really? You can finally explain the scared Grendels?”

Bodil nodded. “And why the Skogs were so friendly and—and knowledgeable when our team showed up. We’re reasonably sure, anyway.”

“Let’s go inside and talk. Starting to sprinkle, and I listen better with dry ears.”

We four perched on chairs I’d crafted over the last decade, with me in the oldest, crudest, and least comfortable of them. Daniel had pulled off his rifle and carefully leaned it against the bubble-filled wall before seating himself.

“Tea, anyone?” I offered. No takers. “In that case, I’m listening.”

Bodil and Tyler looked at each other and through the kind of esoteric communication that Skye and I once took for granted, they decided to let Tyler begin the explaining.

“Assumptions,” he said, “are our enemies. This world and Earth are like siblings, right? DNA and RNA here match terrestrial forms so closely that we could prepare altered seedlings and appropriate mutagens from samples before we’d even set foot on this planet. Think of it!” His eyes blazed despite the dim light. “Right now, our conbots are seeding enough extra territory to support a large human colony in case—”

“Assumptions,” Bodil murmured.

“Right. We’ve forgotten this is an alien world, and some things are very different. Everyone but Bo, I should say. That initial Skog friendliness seemed so, ah, inexplicable because we assumed the native life couldn’t possibly remember visitors so long absent, visitors who’d never been within kilometers from here.

“Bo thought differently, beginning with the idea that the Skogs did remember us, and the mystery was how they could. A few local years back, she came to me with a—care to take over, dear? Your theory, your glory.”

Bodil laughed her deep laugh. “Fine. Just a simple thought. What if genetic differences between Earth and Castaway organisms allow animals here to pass along memories to their offspring?”

I felt stunned. “That,” I said sincerely, “is a remarkable concept. But the mechanism?”

“We’re thinking mostly brain structure. But both parents in every pseudo-mammalian species here lactate.”

“Hah! You suspect some information is... expressed through the milk? Have you tested these
ideas?”

“Ty did the memory tests. We haven’t confirmed my milk theory. “

Tyler leaned forward. “I built a tricky maze, and then captured a dozen klomus to train, only keeping the males and females. I wanted small rodent-types for their quick reproductive cycle. Yes, Arv, I know you’re not fond of the klomus.”

“Don’t mind the mouse aspect,” I corrected. “My issue is how the damn claws tear into our stuff.

If it weren’t for our Skogs, we’d be overrun.”

“For once, the rodents have served us. When they’d mastered the maze, no easy task, I placed them in a large cage far from camp. After they’d done the expected, I took the newborns and raised them for a month away from the parents. Guess what happened when I put them in the maze.”

How disappointing. Could Tyler really be this silly? “They followed the leftover scent of their parents to beat the maze.”

Both scientists burst out laughing. “I predicted you’d say that,” Tyler announced when they’d quieted down. “This was an entirely new maze following the old design, and every clawmouse reached the food without a single error.”

I leaned back as much as my bungled chair would allow and mulled it over. What a discovery...

“So we’re thinking,” I said slowly, “that Skogs hunt baby Grendels when the parent are absent, and if a baby Grendel saw another baby caught and eaten, it could become afraid of Skogs, and pass that fear on to subsequent generations.”

“Explains a lot, no?” Tyler said, grinning. “If the memories don’t get too, ah, diluted, eventually every Grendel will be wary of Skogs.”

My teachers pulled me back to the present, and training resumed. Still, even while abusing branches and tree bark, I sensed some chilling realization just about to leap on me and dreaded sleep almost as much as the coming combat.

Night 14:

Perhaps my teachers understood my mood. They commanded me to eat and didn’t leave until I’d conquered food mountain. From the latest memories to unfold, I guessed that the meat in my distended stomach had come from a Reformer vat, not an animal. I hoped so. The thought of two deaths resulting from the Gate Three competition, and what I had to do to open Gate Four, made the idea of killing any creature a bitterness in my heart. My brooding ended when the soporific sprang at me with invisible claws.

The first dream was brief but powerful.

Tyler had called a general meeting. He acted stressed. I gazed around at the crowd, depressed by how few we’d become. We’d been here ten Earth years although thirty-odd actual years, total, had elapsed on Earth. And aside from the soldiers and me, those of us who’d arrived safely had already been middleaged or older.

The crash had destroyed our gerontological biomedicals, and we could only cobble together inferior substitutes, so we’d lost good people due to failing health, along with those who’d died from accidents and animal attacks. I’d set up a modest cybercytology lab and had saved a few lives with cybercytes programmed to reverse atherosclerosis and certain forms of cancer. But humanity would soon be extinct on this world, barring new arrivals.

“The road to disaster is paved with good intentions,” Tyler said quietly. “Victor here just returned
from checking on bioforming progress in the adjacent forest. When our conbots answered his call, he learned that their programming had, ah, glitched. Instead of seeding half of one other woodland, per instructions, they’d fully seeded nine.” He waited until the unhappy noises had died down. “We’ve disabled the conbots, but every forest within twenty kilometers is now pumping extra oxygen. Almost as bad, our mechanical allies have spread enough surfacing microbots to pave several kilometers of highway. More ecological consequences.”

“The Skogs will have nowhere to go!” Daniel Connor said, generating a second burst of groans and proving that soldiers can be quick on the uptake.

“He’s right,” Bodil affirmed. “So this explains that recent surge in O 2/sub> readings. Victor?”

Victor Hornso stood to address the group.

“The vegetation is changing faster than we’d expected or wanted. And the spore count is already down 10 percent. At this rate, all higher animals in bioformed areas will die within a few years. Not enough time for them to adapt. Suggestions?”

Drew Adams stated what everyone was thinking. “Looking around, I count eight geneticists and one cybercytologist.” Everyone looked at me. Only cybercytes could quickly modify multiple species at once.

“I’ll get right to work,” I said, thinking out loud. “I’ll have to tailor the cytes for individual species, so I’ll need tissue samples from everything from klomus to Grendels. If we can—”

“The primary issue,” Drew interrupted, “isn’t oxygen.”

“Of course,” I said, annoyed by the obvious comment. “It’s the spore reduction. More O 2/sub> will actually help if I can tweak erythrocytes a bit.”

“You haven’t heard about my latest research, Arv. Spores don’t merely supplement the wildlife’s red blood cells. They play a vital part in digestion, tissue repair, and immune response.”

“Oh. That does complicate my problem.”

“Our problem. We all have work ahead.” She gestured toward the Skogkatts lying so near us, clearly longing for an unscheduled treat. “I think our... food-weather friends have real potential. What a loss if they never become fully sentient thanks to us.”

The memory faded as I returned to the deeper waters of sleep.

Day 15:

Bad memories must exert a special pressure. I awoke far too early, and with a crushing sense of failure. Still exhausted but restless, I moved to the cave entrance and looked upward. For an eerie moment that left me shivering, the stars seemed wrong, lurking in alien constellations.

Some greater connection had been made, and I knew. Not everything by any means, but enough. It had been a comedy of errors except for being the opposite of funny, reminding me of failing to get a table level despite repeatedly shortening one leg at time.

After over nine years of intense effort, about the time Earth might be expecting our return home if anyone still cared, we’d only managed to modify half the local animal species. We hadn’t captured let alone sampled a single Grendel, and all First Lander samples had been lost in the crash. We were sick with frustration, and our community now stood at a precarious ten, mostly elderly members, some quite elderly. Karin Waters, our only specialist in animal behavior, had reached eighty-seven.

Only one bright note: by dissecting dead Skog brains, Bo believed she’d identified the unique structures permitting memory sharing.

I tried to comfort myself by thinking how proud my parents would’ve been if they’d known what I’d accomplished under these circumstances. We’d dusted the altered forests with cybercyte mutagens, and so far every transformation had gone as planned.

Yet no matter how many times Vic ran his calculations, his conclusion remained grim. We’d done horrific damage to the local ecosystem, and only a handful of the species we’d worked so hard to modify would survive. Most troubling was that the food supply would soon become too limited to support enough klomus to support a viable Skog breeding population. The First Landers had explored only a tiny fraction of this continent. For all we knew, the Skogkatt species would shortly be erased.

I couldn’t let that happen, but it seemed inevitable.

We held countless meetings trying to solve the unsolvable, and ideas flowed fast and thick, but none would flap let alone fly. Then Bo, bless her bright heart, offered a suggestion showing more desperation than brilliance.

“Can it be done, Arv?” she asked me after a long and pitying group silence.

Perhaps, I thought, but what good would it do? Then a twist on her idea hit me. “Maybe I could make them better hunters,” I said, stalling to consider the twist. “But Vic tells us there won’t be many animals around to hunt.”

“What about making klomus reproduce faster?”

Vic snorted. “And what would they eat? Rebalancing an ecosystem is no simple matter.”

“There’s another way to go,” I said tentatively. “If our main goal is preserving the Skogkatts, we could improvise more food tanks and train Skogs to operate them.”

Ty gaped at me. “So Bo’s idea isn’t the silliest one we’ll hear today.”

“You are the Prince of Tact, Professor Marsh,” Bo responded.

Ty pretended he hadn’t heard, but his ears reddened. “Really, Arv? You think animals could manage the delicate adjustments, nutrient balancing, and repairs? Prehensile tails and claws aren’t fingers.”

I faked confidence. “So I’ll modify their pads into fingers.” Inspiration blazed. “Then they could throw spears or shoot arrows! Hmm. They’ll need to be standing to throw efficiently... or use a bow and arrow. What if I modify their hips and spines? But maybe they should still be able to run on all fours for speed, so the new joints will need greater flexibility than...”

I stopped. Everyone gaped at me.

“Arv,” Bo said. “Even with those... impossible changes, how could Skogs learn the necessary biochemistry?”

“Simple.” An obese lie. “I’ll make them smarter, increasing their brain size, which probably means increasing their overall size. Extend their lifespan as well.” An incredible idea struck me.

“Gud! They’ve already got vocal folds and make all sorts of noises; with some minor articulator changes, they could eventually learn human languages!”

“You truly can perform these miracles?” Bo insisted.

A touch of honestly returned to me.

“Maybe. Tweaking blood cells is simple by comparison, and all modifications have to be inheritable. If I can even develop cybercytes this sophisticated, such radical changes require a heavy dose, so dusting forests is out. Injection is in.”

“Why do I get the feeling,” Vic said, “we’ll be spending our twilight years trapping and training Skogs?”

I shook my head. “Only young kittens. Adult bones are too rigid, adults wouldn’t survive the alterations. I’ll need a lot of kittens.”

An almost unfamiliar voice piped up. Karin Waters, our animal behaviorist, seemed half asleep at meetings and hardly spoke. Now she regarded me dourly. “If you give them fingers, lad, how do you plan on teaching animals that have never had fingers to use them?”

Hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I guess we’ll need a brilliant training protocol. Feeling brilliant, Karin?”

“I’m feeling old, Arvid. But I can try. I’ve been useless for too long. You know, with proper reinforcement, you can teach a chicken to play chess. Trouble is, the chicken will always lose.”

Everyone chuckled, mostly a relief valve for tension, I suspected.

“One thing in our favor,” Bo added, “is that since memory is inheritable here, the next generations won’t need training. If we succeed, the Skogs could endure indefinitely after we’re gone. Who knows how far they’ll go?”

I began contemplating the final bad jokes in the comedy of errors when my teachers appeared, outlined by the sun’s first rays. My food bowl hadn’t been filled, and they’d arrived empty-pawed.

“In battle,” Liana explained, “a full stomach will slow you both mentally and physically. And if you suffer deep abdominal gouges, infections can more easily set in.”

Ares said, “We enriched your dinner last night with enough extra calories to last you until this evening. No matter what happens today, Arlie, you will not be returning here.”

For a surprising moment, a stab of loss drowned out my anxiety about the upcoming battle. In my real life, this had been my only home.

“Today, you must follow some combat rules,” Liana said. “No attack on eyes or ears is permitted.

If you run away, past whatever limits the Gatekeeper sets, that will be counted as losing, and you will be put down. Cutting limb tendons and evisceration is permissible but a kill will not be awarded without severing the spinal cord or neck arteries. Are these things clear?”

Depressingly so, although the ban against going after eyes and ears, in a battle to the death, seemed ridiculous. But I just nodded.

“Since Fourth Gate competitors may never have the chance to become adults, all are granted honorary adulthood. Tradition requires you to assign yourself a theoretical gender, just for today. This will not bind you to that gender when the time comes to take on sexual characteristics.”

The logic to this escaped me, but it gave me a chance to clarify something. “Liana, I think most of Arvid Lund’s memories have come to me now. Isn’t it true that all of us, every Tregul, remember living his life?”

“Yes, but to greatly varying degrees.”

“Since we all remember being male, who would chose to be female?”

“I see. You have the knowledge but haven’t fully explored the feelings. Gender, little one, lies higher on the surface of identity than you think. Ask yourself if Lund, deep down where consciousness lives, ever felt male. His essence, like yours and mine, was sexless.”

“Each Tregul gender,” Ares said, “has advantages. Females tend to be faster, have stronger hind legs, better fine motor skills, and usually live longer. Only females give birth, although unlike humans, both sexes feed newborns with nutritive body fluids. Males tend to have stronger forelegs, stronger hands, and are less prone to certain diseases.”

Liana leaned over to nudge her partner gently with her forehead. “We’re out of time, Ares. Arlie, go rid yourself of all wastes and run to meet us where we met the vehicle before. It’s crucial not to be late. Go now.”

She conveyed such urgency that I arrived at the “bus” stop even before my teachers. The process had been accelerated thanks to fear, which had loosened my bowels. My guts still felt watery.

The vehicle carried three extra air tanks so I wasn’t surprised when Ares informed me that today’s journey would be longer than the previous one. This time, the driver troubled himself to look directly at me, for a moment. His whiskers twitched, and he shook his head slightly as I passed him. I had no idea how to interpret this, but it didn’t ease my anxiety. Both of my teachers followed me in.

Liana, seated in the box next to mine, cautioned me against speaking with my opponent, and muttered again that she wished I’d drawn a different student. That also failed to boost my confidence.

“Do you choose to be an honorary male or female for this contest?” she asked.

I didn’t care, but randomly picked male. The thought of killing a fellow child made me ill, and the thought that I might be killed turned every thought pitch-black. We passed the places where we’d picked up other Third Gate competitors, and then passed the spot where we’d all disembarked to compete. Shortly after that, we stopped.

I assumed the person entering the bus was a smallish but heavyset adult until two larger Tregul followed, clearly teachers. Now I understood just how unlucky I’d been. The student’s neck-ruff put mine to shame, more mane than ruff. Getting my teeth or claws through that would be a chore. Worse, my opponent was nearly double my size, nearly as big as Liana, and sprang halfway down the aisle in a single leap with no apparent effort. I felt completely intimidated.

As the bus rolled on, the four teachers held an inaudible conference. When it ended, Liana returned and told me that my opponent was an honorary female and should be referred to as such for today.

Despite my terror or maybe because of it, the vehicle’s rumbling and rattling made me increasingly sleepy, and I drifted off into semi-dreamy reminiscence....

The project had begun badly. Trying to save their species, I’d killed twelve Skog kittens in twelve different, and I fear horribly painful, ways. I had no modeling software for such massive genetic changes and had to code my own. If my current generation of cybercytes hadn’t been capable of interpretive self-programming based on general instructions, and reproduce as needed, the task would’ve been impossible.

Four wretched years later, I had effective cytes, although by then I’m sure everyone thought of me as a combination sadist and mass murderer, including me. The breakthrough had involved limiting the brain-size increase while building in a gradual generational improvement. So no instant geniuses, but the latest batch of modified kittens seemed healthy and at least somewhat teachable. Feeling reluctant but also that time was running out, I injected the rest. My colleagues and I had amassed three hundred and twelve cuties, with heavy costs to us. Daniel, our last soldier, had been killed by a phobodile while defending Trevor, and we lost Drew to one of the few Grendels still surviving in the forest. As their food supply diminished, more Skogs drifted our way to join the growing community, which made our collecting increasingly easier.

Karin Waters, although frail and sickly, applied the protocols she’d worked out for teaching Skogs to stand, and to use their unnatural fingers. This seemed to revive her, but fearing that her vitality might soon run dry, she trained us all in her methods. Most Skogs responded well enough, and I decided they deserved a new name. “Tregul” seemed perfect.

Our Treguls reached maturity in two years, twice as long as their Skog parents. That’s when we learned the next human-made disaster had already struck.

We released all surviving subjects to live among us and found that only a few knew how or when to operate the time-locked food dispensers we’d set up in hopes that Skogs would stop pestering us to feed them. Their parents had been born knowing.

Experiments confirmed the ruinous truth: boosting Skog intelligence had come at a staggering
price. Treguls could only remember some of their ancestors’ experiences. Cybercyte-based imaging techniques I’d developed to substitute for MRI scans revealed why. Treguls retained the memory-replication structures unique to animals here, but the brain expansion had separated these structures, limiting communication between them.

We’d planned to teach these young minds food tank science, and train them to train subsequent generations. What put the “un” in unmitigated disaster was that our Treguls knew so little. Why would a species with carbon-copy memories need more than a few primitive instincts? This meant we had to teach them survival basics for their own world before we could begin their higher education. With decades to spare, we might’ve pulled it off.

As things stood, all success would only be temporary.

I felt utterly depressed. Saving these beautiful creatures and giving them a chance to reach their potential had become my life’s work. All for nothing. For days, my heart bled sorrow, and I couldn’t even talk about it with my comrades.

When an answer came to me, it meant making the hardest decision of my life....

Liana nudged me softly. “We’re here. Let your opponent exit first, and study its hind— I mean her hindquarters, as she goes by. Look for signs of weakness or unbalance.”

I studied my brains out. “All I saw were big muscles,” I admitted.

Ares, now standing near the bus doors gestured that we should leave but Liana stalled.

“Still, you have advantages. She’s got size and weight working in her favor, but you should be more agile. Use that.” She jumped down from her box, and I joined her in the aisle.

“One more thing,” she said in a near whisper before heading toward the exit, “you’ve recalled your life as Lund much faster and better than other students. Perhaps something in that life could aid you.”

This Gatekeeper awaited us on a mild rise in a small meadow, her fur a faded yellow, tipped with white. She supported herself with a wooden cane, and a scabbard for it hung from her back. She seemed ancient, surely at least twenty years old.

Her voice, though, remained firm as she went over every Fourth Gate rule my teachers had listed, only adding that a crimson ribbon had been wound around the combat area, and going beyond it would disqualify a competitor, with fatal consequences.

I listened, but more of my attention stayed on my opponent, while her emerald eyes studied me from paws to ears. I’d never seen a Tregul like her. Aside from that astonishing ruff, her legs were disproportionally long and thick, but her arms were barely larger than mine. Her torso was practically a cylinder, with minimal taper from chest to abdomen. Her tail had almost no fur. Despite all this strangeness, a sense of familiarity reached me, a hint of significance just beyond my claws, something I’d known in my human life. Unfortunately, it remained a gap in my present one.

The Gatekeeper finished her recitation by suggesting that this might be the last chance for us students to thank our teachers, and we’d be granted a short time to do so.

Liana, Ares, and I said our goodbyes, and both teachers told me they loved me and rubbed against my jaw fur with their own. By now, I felt sure these were my parents, but said nothing about it. At the end, Liana whispered one syllable in my ear.

The Gatekeeper called us back and sent us in opposite directions. We were to keep moving until we reached the ribbon and then would be free to stalk and kill each other.

Strange trees grew here; very tall, with multi-colored leaves in green and orange, and innumerable branches. Shafts of sunlight pierced the foliage as golden tubes scintillating with dust motes. I cherished the beauty while I still could.

Liana had whispered “Arv” so furtively that I knew she’d done something forbidden. She’d offered a similar hint in the bus. What was she scratching at?

I spotted the ribbon ahead and heard a soft crunch from behind me. Instinctively, I jumped to one side. I was a fool! While I’d been meandering, my opponent must’ve run to the ribbon on her side and then run to attack me here. Her leap missed, but when I whirled around to face her, she pounced again.

Only a desperate roll saved me. Even so, sharp claws lightly scraped my side. Pain came an instant later, and I felt a warm drip of blood. Ears back, tail laid forward on my back so she couldn’t grab it, I bounded away at top speed, running parallel to the ribbon. I could hear her, mere inches behind me.

I seemed faster, but not by much.

I headed toward a tight cluster of saplings, and darted between them knowing she wouldn’t fit.

That got me some breathing room, so I kept going, using the same trick to get increasingly ahead.

Soon, she was nowhere in sight, and as silently as possible, I scrambled up the tallest nearby tree until I reached the middle branches.

For a time I sat there, panting. Then I checked on my wound, making sure no blood dripped to the ground. The cut was barely a nick, far more painful than serious, and bleeding had stopped despite my furious running. I licked the remainder off my fur, amazed that I’d gotten off so lightly. I could’ve sworn she’d been close enough for those claws to really tear into me....

For this quiet moment, I was safe. But she’d be following my scent and—wait! I hadn’t been that far ahead. Why wasn’t she here already? A fresh blast of fear set me shaking.

Think, Arv! I told myself. And in a twilight instant before remembering that I wasn’t Arv, a slight modification he’d incorporated into the Tregul design came to me like a flash of hope.

I looked upward. Every branch appeared too healthy for my purposes, but then I noticed a section of wind or ice damaged ones high above. A sound from below snapped my eyes downward. She squatted on her haunches, emerald eyes sunlight-blazing, staring at her prey, me. Her claws sprang out as she leapt to the tree and began climbing.

Again, my lighter frame helped me. She was still climbing as I reached my chosen perch: a dying branch two body-lengths directly below a dead one. I lost sight of my opponent as I scrambled out on the limb as far as I dared. Carefully but quickly, I turned around to face the tree’s trunk.

She reached my elevation and hesitated, back claws sunk into the tree trunk, front paw-fingers tightly gripping my branch. If she guessed my plan, she could shake me off the tree with no danger to her. If she leaped on me, we’d surely fall together.

For a long moment we remained statuestill, eyes locked, ears back. Then with liquid grace, she eased onto my branch and worked her way toward me. I made a show of looking for another branch to jump to. The nearby ones were clearly too fragile to trust.

Not yet, I told myself as she drew closer. But doing nothing made me crazy, too aware that if she suddenly sped up and got her claws into me, nothing could save me.

She kept approaching slowly. Maybe she felt suspicious, unsure that cornering myself had simply been idiotic or suicidal. Then she was close enough.

I reached up with my tail, wrapped it around the dead branch above, and tugged with all my strength. It broke off with an incredible snap and was so heavy that I couldn’t wield it but only nudge it in midair so that it didn’t hit me while I guided it down on her. Then I had to let it go.

“When strategy fails,” Ares had said during one training session, “improvisation may succeed.”

She plummeted, apparently not completely stunned because she managed to slow her fall somewhat by reaching out and clawing branches in passing. But we’d been a long way from the ground. She hit hard and lay utterly still. I could see her breathing. If she wasn’t faking
unconsciousness, this had to be my only chance to win the contest.

Hurriedly backing down the tree trunk, a taste of bile filled my mouth. I desperately wanted to live, but the thought of killing another person appalled me.

I approached her slowly and silently, ready to spring away. Muscles trembling with tension, I intentionally scraped a claw against a fallen twig. The sound drew no reaction. Neither did repeatedly nudging her face with my tail.

Lund had added an extra instruction set to the cybercytes he’d brewed to turn Skogkatts into Treguls. Digging up ancient bones, Lund’s team had discovered something I’d remembered just in time: Skogkatts had once been six-limbed arboreals. While easing into land-based living, my kind had evolved to combine our two bottom limbs into a prehensile tail, still useful in trees, but a crucial balance-aid while running down prey. Lund had chosen to strengthen our tails to accommodate Tregul weight, should we ever feel an urge to hang from branches again. As a result, I was alive. And stalling.

No way to avoid the final test. I jumped on my opponents back. Still no reaction. She really was out. All I had to do was bite through her ruff and then her spinal cord, and I’d keep living. Small as I was, I had the teeth and jaws to do it.

Instead, I stood frozen, paws warmed by the body heat of my fallen enemy, aghast and baffled by my inability to save myself.

Slowly, the understanding...

It had taken me weeks to convince Bo, and she finally convinced the others. Our intervention on this world had been a disaster, and the only fix I could imagine was... expensive. We knew that Tregul retained all the physical and electrochemical mechanisms needed to receive memories from their ancestors. What they lacked was a means for those mechanisms to communicate with each other.

I’d already solved part of that problem by programming cybercytes to disassemble into molecular form to pass brain-blood barriers, map certain aspects of a living brain, and then reassemble themselves outside the brain, bearing retrievable information. If I had a team of cybercytologists here with access to a real lab, perhaps cytes could eventually be developed to act as a communications bridge.

But I had no team or major lab, and limited time. Also no clue if Tregul milk carried Bo’s still-theoretical extra information.

What I could do was to program cytes to map my brain deeply enough to store some of my memories, and then exit my body and keep replicating, information included. The product could be injected or, if I included enteric protection, fed into Treguls. The cytes should then take up residence in Tregul brains, feeding their stored data directly into the waiting memory-retrieval systems.

Foolproof?

Hardly. First, this wouldn’t provide Treguls generational memory, just endlessly replicate mine.

Second, the programming involved would be horrendously complicated and might easily fail. Third, variations among Treguls would likely produce varying results. Fourth, and literally the killer, to gain access to my memories rather than simply map my lobes, the cytes would have to, essentially, dissolve my brain. A poor hope, for sure, but the only one.

After everyone had so very reluctantly agreed to the plan, it took me over a year to prepare the cytes, and then Victor and others volunteered to get the lethal injection.

But this was my life’s work, my responsibility, and I would allow no one else to take my place.

As I lay dying, surrounded by friends, memories fading, an unexpected clarity arose in me. It was as if layers of paint were being stripped off of a brilliant light....

Here, Arvin’s inward-spiraling awakenings became too profound or perhaps too simple for me to follow. Something about identity. But one lesser realization blazed in his heart, and now in mine, with a humorously ironic warmth.

In one valid sense, Lund had, through dying, accidentally made himself immortal. So long as Treguls existed and passed along his memory-containing cybercytes to their offspring, aspects of his personality would be reborn over and over.

My teachers had admitted that, to a greater or lesser degree, every Tregul became Arvid Lund.

Killing my opponent would be tantamount to killing myself.

Intellectually, I knew that would make no difference, since she was me just as I was her, and that shared part of us would continue no matter what. And I so desired to keep living in this body. But I just couldn’t commit suicide through murder even though I was committing suicide by not murdering.

I stepped to the ground and tried to tell Liana and Ares how sorry I was to have failed them. But my throat had clamped tight, and speaking wasn’t possible.

A frustrating surprise, but Arv’s knowledge explained it, at least partly.

Grendels, equipped with huge ears, located their prey largely through sound. So a Skogkatt’s best friend when a Grendel appeared was enforced muteness. Apparently, Treguls had inherited this instinct, but with us, it seemed any strong-enough emotion could shut us up.

Then my teachers tried to talk and could only squeak faintly. I bowed my head in mute acceptance as they tried to console me by rubbing their sides against mine. Finally, Liana gave me a significant nudge, and I obediently followed my teachers through the woods. I glanced back and got another surprise. My opponent and her teachers were already walking in the opposite direction. She not only seemed perfectly healthy, but she practically bounced along. She noticed me noticing her and bared her teeth, not threateningly, but in a feeble imitation of a human grin.

Confused and upset by what might’ve been intended as a smirk, I continued on until we came to another road, another carpet of microbots. A different vehicle waited there, smaller than the first.

We climbed on board, and the female driver nodded to me as I passed her. We who are about to die nodded back. The passenger boxes were no roomier than those on the previous bus, but Liana squeezed next to me in mine. A tight fit, but comforting. I stared out the window and tried to quiet my terror and misery.

I thought about my life, an ephemeral and mostly pleasant one, on top of a long life rich with both happiness and grief. We were connected, Arv and I, indirectly through the transformation of my ancestors and these forests, directly through his memories, and physically because the white dust I’d been eating with every meal were his cybercytes, inherently part of him.

Breathe slower and deeper, I told myself, again borrowing human knowledge. Remember that an important part of me will not vanish with the death of this body.

Perhaps this helped. When I tried speaking, my voice sounded strange, but words emerged.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “Is there some... special place where the failures are put down?”

Ares made a choked noise while Liana’s muscles, pressed against my side, tightened. She twisted her neck enough so that her eyes could meet mine. Hers were very bright. She managed to squeak some words herself.

“Little one! We are going home. You’ve passed the Fourth Gate, and proved yourself worthy to join society.”

I was too stunned to respond, too stunned to feel any relief. “What?” I finally managed. “But I didn’t kill that child!”

“If you had tried hard enough you would’ve failed the test. Cruel, but necessary. We’ve told you
that our kind has terribly limited resources and living space. Our society is very delicately balanced.

Until we can expand our territories, we can’t afford members eager to murder in order to save themselves.”

Ares found his own voice. “That was no child, Arlie, but a specially trained proctor, Remsigne, by name.”

“She’s an adult?”

“Yes but not a ‘she. Or a ‘he’ for that matter.” Ares produced one of his rare laughs. “Due to preconceptions based on Lund’s youthful memories, our younger children have never realized, on their own, that Treguls have three voluntary sexes: male, female, and guardian. You’ve progressed so incredibly quickly that we weren’t sure you’d stay ignorant for long enough. So we invented that honorary-gender nonsense to keep your mind locked into the misconception. Didn’t want you remembering about our third sex and discovering our deception. Remsigne, of course, is a guardian.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Our test would’ve been meaningless if you knew you were facing an adult. Listen. Many Tregul generations have lived since Lund died, and we’ve had time to... refine our citizenship trials. For Gate Four, we’ve found it best to put the student under maximum stress by pitting them against an obviously far superior peer who then can fake losing the battle, although in your case Remsigne had to do very little acting. What a strategy you came up with!”

“I still—”

“Guardians are smaller than reproductive adults, but stronger, tougher, and faster. Longer claws and they can jump.”

“So she—whatever the word—let me win. What if I’d bitten through its neck?”

Now Liana laughed. “Fake ruff with armor beneath. Fake unconsciousness, too. Guardians barely notice a fall from that height.”

Finally, relief flooded into me. But as fear faded, it left an underlying unhappiness exposed.

“I must ask,” I said, trying hard to sound calm, “are you my parents?”

They both looked at me in surprise.

“We were just about to tell you,” Ares said. “Again, you surpass our expectations, so swift to comprehend that you are far ahead of your siblings, leaving us free to spend so much time with you.

We are so proud of you.”

I spat it out. “But how can you be willing to... risk your own children?”

“Willing?” Liana asked gently. “This is heartbreak but dire necessity. And most of us consider it best to give our loved ones what we can while we can. We’ve had previous litters, dear one, and nothing but terrible losses. You’re our first child to have passed every test. I can’t even believe it’s real yet. But welcome, welcome to your family! Now your real education begins. Be as joyful as you can. Life is hard, but we can all be thankful that you’ll have one.”

Detroit Hammersmith, Zero-Gravity Toilet Repairman

(Retired)

Suzanne Palmer | 7411 words

Illustrated by Kevin Speidell

The maintenance staff of Aldruna Station were a competent lot—hell, he’d trained most of them himself—but by the third plea for help he knew it meant big trouble. He had his own small flyer, not very fast or fancy but reliable and familiar, and the truth was not much else to do, so he packed his tools and went.

Aldruna had cleared him for docking before he even had the station in sight, and there was a small welcoming committee waiting for him inside the dock’s airlock. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Mr. Hammersmith,” the station manager said, reaching out to vigorously shake his hand before she introduced the others gathered. “I’m Marla Vissock, this is Administrator Biner from the Alliance Diplomacy Corps, and I think you know the crew.”

“Call me Deet,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Fourteen of our public toilet facilities are offline, mostly in the conference ring. We believe it’s intentional sabotage, but given the sensitive nature of our mission it’s been difficult to get any leads.”

“There are no leads,” Administrator Biner corrected. He was a thin scowl of a man, about Detroit’s own age.

Detroit rolled his shoulders, cracked his knuckles, and picked up his toolbag. “Well, I’ll fix them,” he said. “Keeping someone from breaking them again is up to you.”

Vissock waved a hand toward the head of the repair crew, a round, quietly competent man named Emmer Ives. Detroit had worked with him years before. “Emmer, he’s all yours,” she said. “Report as soon as you know anything.”

Biner stepped forward. “Let me make this clear: the ambassadorial guests are off-limits. Do not talk to them, or be seen at all if you can manage it. There are standards of propriety—”

“No worries, Mr. Biner,” Detroit said. “I know where a working man just doesn’t belong.”

Emmer managed not to smile until they’d left the docking bay. “Glad to see you again, Deet,” he said as they crossed through blast doors into the interior halls. “You remember the setup here?”

“Central station hub and two rings, variable gravity.”

“We keep the lower ring at around point eight Gee for the staff, but the upper ring is now at zero

—we had a huge diplomatic incident a few years back, because some ambassador was convinced the Alliance was skewing the advantage in negotiations by providing more home-like gravity for favored species. Since then, all negotiations take place in zero and everyone gets zero-grav quarters if they stay on-station, no exceptions. Still plenty of complaining, of course.”

“Of course,” Detroit said.

“I’ve taken three units apart, but couldn’t find the problem in any. Which do you want to see first?

A disassembled one, or the most recent to fail?”

“Newest one first, please,” Deet said. “And no hints. I just want to start fresh with my own eyes.”

“Figured as much,” Emmer said. “We’re almost in the zero-grav hall. Normal atmo and climate temp.”

“Great,” Deet said, following Emmer through the airlock into the spoke. “Nothing worse than those heavy-gravity burning swamp-world environment settings.” He laughed. “Remember when you first started here, and there was that delegation of spindly glass-like aliens from some frozen-acid world—?”

“Oh, I remember,” Emmer said. “I remember someone telling me they were from a desert planet and to dress light....”

Deet switched on his magnetic boots as he stepped through the double airlock into the zone. “And I seem to remember someone dumped most of my personal effects in station composting that night.”

Emmer bounced off the floor, up to the ceiling, then pushed himself back down just as he turned his own boots on and stuck to the floor with a sharp snap. “Bathroom’s up on the right.”

The bright out-of-order sign was cycling through the usual written, textural, and sonic languages.

It was a single-occupant facility, the model no more than two standards old. “You finally upgraded the old flakey P-Matic90s? Did you have one of those infamous compressor-failure fireballs?”

“No, lucky for us. You know the old station manager wouldn’t spend a rusty bitcred on the place if he didn’t have to, but when Vissock came in she found all the denied urgent project requests you put in before you retired. Asked me what it was all about, then put up the funds. She said that while there were certainly some planetary representatives she wouldn’t mind seeing blown up ‘in the shitter,’ it would give the station a bad rep.”

Detroit laughed as he let go of his toolkit and began unpacking tools into the air around it.

“Vissock seems like a big improvement over old Mel.”

“Yeah. We like her. She treats the staff like we matter,” Emmer said. “These toilet problems? If they’re not resolved soon, that’s going to look bad for us. Especially if we can’t prove it was intentional sabotage, instead of mismanagement.”

The unit was a central concave pod with handles, several flexible suction units, a “comfort attachment” selector and disposal, and a large bank of controls. It was a complex business, dealing with variable to no gravity and a universe’s worth of physiological divergence.

Detroit took the front cover off the control unit and checked the interface mechanics. He tapped the main control processor, and it came back immediately green. “Nothing wrong with the logics,” he said. “The start of the problems—does it time with any new arrivals?”

“Yeah. More than a half-dozen, unfortunately. We’re currently hosting a planetary resource
summit, and there are representatives here from over a dozen human colonies, and nine different nonhuman political entities. We can rule out some, but not most.”

Detroit held onto one of the unit’s handlebars and stuck an airflow probe into the pod as he pressed the Go button. Nothing happened. A few moments later, the diagnostic unit flashed up a new green bar. “Well, it thinks it worked,” Deet said. “No suction at all though.”

Emmer nodded.

Grabbing a new tool, Detroit took out the bolts along one side of the unit front and swung the front panel open. He floated there for long minutes, his eyes slowly tracing out all the machinery and wiring. He noticed Emmer had started holding his breath. “Did you find it, when you looked?” Detroit asked.

Emmer let his breath out. “No,” he said, chagrinned. “Tell me what I missed.”

“Nothing. Problem’s not here.” Swapping out tools, he began disassembling the unit, carefully removing one component at a time and examining it before letting it go into the room. At last he reached in and pulled out a large cylindrical device.

“The vacuum exchanger?” “Yeah.”

Detroit turned it around in his hands a few times, then began unscrewing the end.

“I didn’t think we were supposed to open those.”

“You’re not.” He pulled the end off, then peered inside. “There’s a three-centimeter hole in the interior shielding,” he said. “Looks like corrosion, but everything else in here is pristine.”

Emmer peered over Detroit’s shoulder as best he could. “What could do that? Acid?”

“Nothing strong enough should have gotten past the chemical sensors at the funnel intake without being neutralized first.” Detroit carefully slid off the exterior shielding. He used the tip of his screwdriver to indicate, from several inches away, a small cluster of wires and relays painted red. “If you ever do this— and you shouldn’t—don’t touch that, or we’ll be cleaning what’s left of you off the far wall.”

“Noted,” Emmer said. He pointed. “What’s that?”

Detroit turned the cylinder. There was a small blackish-green lump stuck to the metal on the other side of the hole. “Hand me the wooden stick in my bag?” he asked.

Emmer handed it to him, and he very carefully snaked it in between wires. Deftly, he scraped off the lump, which stuck to the stick as he extracted it. He pulled out a magnifier and set it against his eye to peer at it more closely, staring at it for several long, silent minutes.

“So,” Emmer said. “Super alien sabotageturd?”

“No,” he said at last, hearing the disbelief in his voice. “It’s a frog.”

He wrapped the remains of the frog, still stuck to the end of his stick, in a small cloth and tucked it into a pocket so he could free up his hands again. Taking a roll of tape and a spray-tube out of his kit, he managed to wriggle a small piece of the tape over the outside of the hole. Once satisfied it was tight, he filled the hole on the inside with spray foam. “Once that sets, it’ll be good for a quarter-standard or so. Enough time to get a replacement part out here, anyway.”

“So... is that the problem, then?”

“The hole? I expect so.”

“No, the... frob or whatever you said it was.”

Detroit chuckled, as he began screwing back on the end cap of the unit. “Frog. Forgot you weren’t an Earther kid.”

“Haudie North, through and through,” Emmer said.

“I used to spend summers at my Nana’s house, lying by the edge of the pond in her back yard,
catching frogs and turtles and dragonflies and you name it. She always made me let them all go again at the end of the day, before she’d let me sit down to dinner. Those were the happiest days of my life.”

“The only thing you said that I understood is dinner,” Emmer said, “which I’d like to get some of, sometime tonight.”

Detroit slipped the reassembled vacuum exchanger back into place and closed up the unit.

Grabbing his probe from where it bobbed in the middle of the room, he stuck it back into the user pod and pressed the flush button again. This time, he could feel the tug of air on the hairs on his forearm.

“One fixed,” he declared. “Damned if it makes any sense to me, though. Next?”

“Just down the hall, third left. I should give Vissock an update and check in with the rest of my crew. You need me for this?”

“I’m good for now. Got a spare comm?”

Emmer patted his pockets, pulled out a small disk with the Aldruna Station logo on it, and handed it over. He started to turn away, then turned back. “Frob?”

“Frog.”

“Frog. Got it. Thanks, Deet.”

Detroit made his way down the corridor toward the next broken facility, nearly colliding as he came around the curve with an elderly woman in gray. She was taking advantage of the zero gravity to fling herself down the corridor like a human cannonball. They both dodged, and she corrected off the wall to go around him. “So sorry!” she called back without slowing down. Only after she was gone did the green teardrop logo on her jacket register. A Gaian diplomat, he thought. Gaia Colony was a pacifist religious-scientist colony dedicated to multi-planetary environmental activism.

If she’d been moving slower, he could have asked her if she knew anything about frogs.

He keyed open the next out-of-order bathroom and slung his toolbag in. Following the same diagnostic steps as before, he ended up once again contemplating the vacuum exchanger. This one had three small holes, and on the outside of the inner shielding, four identical froggy lumps, two clustered at the same hole.

“Well, huh,” Detroit said, scratching his forehead.

He grabbed the end of the wooden stick, still in his pocket, and carefully pulled it and the rag he’d wrapped around the end out. Unwrapping the rag, he meant to use it to clear off the first frog body, but as he did, it came off the stick into the rag on its own. To his eye, it was distinctly greener than before.

He took out his magnifier again and peered at it, and when it opened one round eye and peered back, he gave a yelp of surprise and let everything go into the air around him.

Heart pounding, he watched as the frogthing floated in the air in front of him, slowly unfurling six legs and waving them feebly.

Not a frog, then, not an Earth thing, but so close as to be nearly unbelievable. Even the two—no, three—round eyes now regarding him could have been conjured from his memories of lying in the reeds waiting for those telltale bumps to break the water surface. Unable to help himself, he slowly extended one finger, not touching but putting it within the frog-thing’s reach. It reached out one leg, its tiny rounded toes splayed, and touched his finger.

In an instant it wrapped itself around his fingertip. Its hue shifted lighter as it warmed, until he had a bright green alien frog clinging to his index finger, blinking a fourth eye open at him.

I should shake it off, he thought. What if it was dangerous? But he had to admit, he felt irrationally, nostalgically fond of it already.

Careful to keep his occupied finger clear, he hooked the safe end of the cylinder into the crook of his elbow and, one by one, pried off the frogs and transferred them to his rag. Then he filled the holes,
reassembled the unit, and turned it back on.

Opening the rag, he peered at the blackgreen lumps, then carefully leaned over and blew across them. Immediately, the colors began to lighten on three of the four. He loosely closed up the rag and tucked it back into his pocket before pulling out his comm.

“Emmer?” he asked. “Same problem with the second unit. Where’s the next down unit?”

“Keep going clockwise,” Emmer answered. “You’ll find it.”

“Okay,” Detroit said. “Oh, and can you bring me a small box—something that closes—and a medical heatpack?”

“Whatever you need. On my way in five.”

Detroit regarded the thing still clinging to his finger, that was now regarding him back. “Hello, thing,” he said.

Peep, it answered. Detroit smiled.

He had just finished pulling apart the housing on the third unit when Emmer entered, swinging a small lidded bucket. Vissock came in behind him and locked the door. At Detroit’s raised eyebrow, she rolled her eyes. “Biner has my office bugged,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s not beyond the Alliance to decide it’d be easier to ruin one station manager’s reputation than potentially embarrass an ambassador or diplomat by accusing them of a crime. I’m not giving them that opportunity. If anyone asks, you’re just fixing the toilets and have no opinions on why or how they broke. Speaking of which...”

Detroit held out his finger, with the alien perched on it. She peered closely. “It’s alive? How did frogs get in my toilets? We’re a long seven jumps from Earth. And why?”

“The why is beyond me,” Detroit said, “but they’re not from Earth, and there’s six more in this unit.”

He took the bucket from Emmer and tacked the heatpack to the bottom, set to a low warm. Then he took the rag out of his pocket and settled it inside, adding the new frogs to the ones already clinging, huddled, together. One remained obstinately dark and unmoving. “I think that one’s dead,” he said.

He sealed and reassembled the unit. “I have extra tape and bonding sealant, but no more sticks,”

he said, “Emmer, if you’re going poke around in the exchanger, you need something non-conductive.”

“I can find something,” Emmer said.

“Oh, and I saw a Gaian in the hall earlier,” Detroit said. “Maybe she could identify where these things come from?”

“I can try,” Vissock said. “Gaia Colony’s petition against Skriknat was on the docket for today, but the negotiations between the Sfazili government and Tanduou Dockmasters have run over yet again. May I take the dead one? I also want to consult our chief medic, who’s a bit of a alien-species buff.”

Detroit picked it up gently and handed it over.

Vissock took it just as carefully. “I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

“Thanks,” Detroit said, and Vissock left.

Emmer sighed. “So, that’s three fixed. How much more of that sealant do you have?”

“One more tube,” Detroit said, pulling it out of his bag and sending it drifting through the air to Emmer. “If we find too many more of those holes, it’s not going to be enough.”

“I’ll check to see if we have more,” Emmer said, catching it. “Then I’m going to get started at the other end of the zone. It’s going to be a long day.”

“That it is,” Detroit said.

Peep peep, said the frog-thing on his finger.

He was on his seventh unit when his tube of sealant ran out. “Well, I guess that’s that,” he said.

Peep, said the frog-thing, which had slowly crept from his finger down along his forearm over the course of an hour. Peep deep.

“Peep deep at you, too,” he answered. By his count, he had twenty-one live frogs in his bucket and two more probably dead ones. He’d tried twice to coax the one on his finger into joining its kin, but it seemed determined to hang on to him, and it was small enough that he hadn’t wanted to pry too hard. “Time for a break.”

Deep deep deet, it said.

He laughed. “Deet, right,” he said. “That’s me, you got me.”

When he had the unit reassembled and tested, he pinged Emmer on the comms. “I’m out of sealant.”

“I’ve got more coming in with a supply run from Meridan Station, but we won’t see it until early tomorrow. Wash up and dinner?”

“Sounds good,” he said, and it did.

Vissock cleared out space in one of the supply closets and had a bunk set up for him. “It’s not much,” she said.

“It’s enough,” he said. It even had gravity. He closed the door and set his bucket of frogs down in one corner, his toolbag beside it. The closet was stuffy and warm, so he stripped off his shirt and hung it with the brooms on the back of the door, then fell onto the cot already half asleep.

He awoke in the morning to find his chest covered with frogs, one tucked neatly in an armpit.

“Okay,” he said, peeling them off one by one and putting them back in the bucket. “That’s just going too far.”

Deet deet deet, the last one said as he shook it free. Deet deet bom bom.

He put the lid back on the bucket, made sure it was on tightly this time, then threw his shirt back on and picked up his tools. Vissock and Emmer had arranged to meet in one of the staff bathrooms, so he headed that way first. He was thinking about coffee and breakfast and home when he turned a corner and ran straight into Administrator Biner.

“Mr. Hammersmith,” Biner said. “Good morning.”

“Good morning to you,” Detroit said. He smiled and tried to step around him, but Biner slid sideways right into his path again.

“I’d like to hear your assessment of the situation,” Biner said.

“Vissock will report—”

“I want to hear it directly,” Biner said. “If this is deliberate sabotage, the situation will need to be managed, Mr. Hammersmith, and by someone who understands the priorities of both the Alliance and the mission of this station.”

Detroit leaned forward. “I fix toilets,” he said, “and I have several more to go. If I have any conclusions, then ask me when I’m done.” He brushed past Biner and continued down the hall without looking back.

He found the designated bathroom, unlocked it, went inside, and locked it again. Vissock and Emmer were mid-argument when he walked in. “Am I interrupting?” he asked.

“No,” Vissock said. “Biner cornered Emmer and threatened him.”

“I told him to fuck off,” Emmer said. “If she wants me to be diplomatic to him I better get paid a lot more.”

“He stopped me too, wanting information,” Detroit said. “Can’t say as how I gave him any.

What’s our status?”

Emmer held out a tube of sealant. “I’ve got two more, so that should cover us,” he said.

“Even one should be more than enough—”

“Three more down today, including one you fixed yesterday,” Vissock said. She looked dejected.

“Still no idea who’s responsible.”

“Did we find out anything about the frogs?”

“No. The Sfazili-Tanduou negotiations broke down again and the Gaia-Skriknat meet has started.

We only have the one Gaian rep on board, and she’ll be in there for a while. This whole Bom situation is complicated.”

“Bom?” Detroit’s eyebrows shot up. Deet deet bom, the frog had said.

“It’s a planet just inside the Bounds. Skriknat has laid claim it, but Gaia is pressing for it to be reclassified as protected,” Vissock said.

Emmer frowned. “What’s wrong, Detroit?”

“I’m just thinking,” Detroit said. “I bet Bom is wet, and that if we investigate the quarters of the Skriknatti ambassador and the Gaian representative, one of them will have a broken bathroom.”

“Yeah?” Emmer asked. “What did you find?”

Detroit didn’t want to say: the frog spoke to me. “Just a hunch,” he said instead.

“There’s no way we’ll get permission to search anyone’s quarters until after they’ve left the station,” Vissock said. “Biner would have my head for suggesting it, even with proof. And if you’re not sure... I’m sorry.”

“What if there was some other reason we needed to go in there?” Emmer asked.

“What are you thinking?”

“Do you trust me?” Emmer asked.

Vissock met Emmer’s gaze and held it, then nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But I also like you, so don’t do anything that’ll make me have to fire you. A bunch of broken toilets just aren’t that important.”

“Then I suggest you go have a nice breakfast and spend some solid plausible-deniability time on datawork,” Emmer said.

Vissock stood up from where she’d been leaning on a wall. “Absolutely no fire,” she said. “Got it?”

“No fire. Got it,” Emmer said. Vissock left the room.

“So, what’s your plan?” Detroit asked.

Emmer frowned. “Well, it was fire,” he admitted. “We need an excuse to check all the quarters in the ambassadorial ring; if we enter them all, the Skriknatti can’t claim they were singled out.

Resetting the smoke sensors after a small hall blaze would do it, but...”

Detroit shook his head. “You have access to the kitchen?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s go. I have an idea.”

Detroit followed Emmer through the halls to the back doors of the station kitchen. As they walked in, there were two cooks at the prep counter dicing up vegetables, and another one by a small desk, staring at his handpad. He looked up. “Emmer?” he asked.

“Don’t mind us, Nicko,” Emmer said. “We just came to borrow... urm. Detroit, what did we need to borrow again?”

Detroit glanced at Emmer, uncertain about trusting the cook. Noticing the exchange, Nicko stood and turned to his prep cooks. “You two!” he bellowed. “Go inventory the protein bricks. Now.”

Grumbling, both men put down their knives and headed off. “So, what do you need?” Nicko asked.

“Do you have any gsesi seed?” Detroit asked.

“Yeah,” Nicko said. He walked over to the wide pantry cabinets lining the back of the kitchen.

“We only use it when there are Gnetsians on station—bitter, gritty shit, but they want it on everything.” He made a face. Opening the cabinet doors, he stared at the chaos for about thirty seconds, then reached in and plucked a single, small, black-tinted jar from the depths and handed it to Emmer.

“I assume whoever you’re pranking, it’s not any of my people, and they deserve it,” the cook said.

Emmer nodded. “You know nothing about this, right?”

“Right. Hey!” Nicko screamed toward the back of the room. “You done yet? Celery isn’t going to chop itself!”

Emmer and Detroit let themselves back out. In the hall, Emmer handed over the jar. “And what are we doing with this?” he asked.

Detroit shook the jar, listening to the satisfying rattle of tiny seeds, then tucked it into his toolbag.

“Gsesi seed has some unique properties beyond taste,” he answered. “One not commonly known is that it scans as a false positive for IGGYs.”

“IGGYs?”

“‘I’m Gonna Get You’s,” Detroit said. “Prank nanos? Smartdust?”

“Oh, right,” Emmer said. “Didn’t someone once turn an entire moonbase of people blue and hairy with them?”

“Yeah,” Detroit said. “Not all IGGYs are benign, so they’re considered a Class-A security hazard. If we dump the seed into the main waste-system fluid pressure lines, it should set off a dozen or more alarms and necessitate an inspection of all systems for contamination. Even better, the fluid itself will dissolve the seed, leaving no trace.”

“Biner’s going to pucker vacuum,” Emmer said. “As much as that appeals to me, is Vissock right?

Are we taking this too far?”

Detroit shrugged. “It’s your call. But there’s more going on here, and I don’t know if we’re going to figure it out without knowing who’s breaking the toilets.”

“I never did like vandals,” Emmer said. “Let’s do it.”

The first station alarm sounded exactly twelve minutes after they’d dumped the small jar of seed into central systems. Emmer and Detroit had both gone back to work on a broken unit, business as usual.

Vissock called, her expression haggard. “Security systems are detecting malicious tech in the pressure systems in the ambassadorial ring,” she said.

“What?” Emmer said. He let go of his tools quickly, plucking his handpad out of the air. “Can you send me what data you’ve got?”

Biner’s face crowded into the small screen. “I need to know if someone is trying to sabotage our negotiations,” he said. “I need to know right now. And I need to know exactly whose security lapse on this station led to this situation.”

“Hold your static,” Emmer said. “We need to look at the data first.”

Detroit checked the pad. “Smartdust,” he said.

“I know that,” Biner growled. “But what kind? What does it do? Who put it there?”

“Can’t tell ya,” Emmer said. “But I’d advise you to evacuate the ambassadorial ring and
conference zone until we’ve cleared it. We’ll need full access.”

“You got it,” Vissock said, before Biner could argue. “Be fast, and be discreet.”

“Always,” Emmer said. “We’ll check in as soon as we find anything.” He disconnected just as Biner was opening his mouth to speak. “I think we’re going to owe Vissock a drink,” he added.

“I think we’re going to owe her a whole damned bottle,” Detroit said. “So: take them in order?”

“Yep. You take the left, I’ll take the right. If the occupant is still at home, call security and skip ahead.”

There were twenty-one guests currently on-station, not including Biner who had quarters in the same ring. Detroit worked his way up his side, checking one by one, dutifully scanning the plumbing systems for smartdust even as he checked that each system was still operating. The Yuaknari ambassador had flooded his room, leaving large blobs of water slowly coalescing midair in the zero gravity. The E’zon ambassador had taken all the cushions from the grippy chairs and sofas, turning them into pillow-fort-style burrow anchored to a light fixture. Biner’s quarters were so neat Detroit almost thought it was a vacant room until he found the closet stacked with two dozen pairs of identical Alliance dress shoes. Neither the Sfazili or Tanduoan quarters—both human worlds—had anything remarkable about them.

He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and swiped his newly empowered pass for the Skriknatti suite. He’d met one once and was not eager to repeat the experience; the Skriknatti were like bright red, upright, scaly pillbugs, except instead of faces they had what appeared to be an anemone plastered there, with an eyeball on the end of each wavy tentacle. To his relief, the door opened on an empty room.

Or, almost empty. There were cages floating around the room, filled with tiny, crayfish-like creatures. Food? he wondered. Pets? Offspring? Whatever they were, they were terrified of him, and pressed themselves to the back of their cages squealing as he floated into the room.

The bathroom was at the rear of the unit; he kicked off the wall beside the door and drifted back.

He ran his wand over the unit first, getting the obligatory scans for smartdust out of the way. Then, like all the others before, he stuck his airflow meter down into the pod and was not at all surprised when it registered nothing. “Gotcha,” he said. He picked up his comm. “Emmer, how much time do I have? I want to disassemble the Skriknatti toilet.”

“I don’t think we have time for that. Biner will be counting the seconds ‘til we report in.”

“Five minutes,” Detroit said. He was already taking off the front plate. “Where are you?”

“Just finishing checking the Haudie South quarters, found plenty of interesting stuff but nothing I was looking for. Heading to the Gaian suite next. I can check the Dourelian rooms for you, and then we’re done, but we both have to be done.”

“Got it.”

Detroit pulled out the vacuum exchanger, unscrewed it, and stared. The entire interior of the unit was pocked with holes, and in the casing he counted at least two dozen frogs. Shit, he thought. I forgot my bucket. With his stick, he scraped frogs from the exchanger directly into his toolbag.

“Deet! Time’s up,” Emmer called over the comms.

No time to fix the exchanger. He locked it back into place, closed up the cabinet, and shoved himself off the wall and out the door, breathing hard. Behind him, the caged creatures were a wailing chorus of despair.

Emmer was in the hall. “Biner wants a full report,” he said, “What are we going to tell him?”

“That it’s the Skriknatti who’ve been sabot—”

“What are we going to tell him about the IGGYs?” Emmer interrupted. “He’s still not going to
care about the toilets, and besides, it’s not that simple.”

“What do you mean, not that simple?”

Emmer reached into his pocket and pulled out a trio of frogs. “They were in the Gaian quarters too. Right on the damned walls.”

“That makes no sense!”

“Well, while you’re thinking about it, can you first figure out what we’re going to tell Biner?

Because I don’t think he’s going to believe us that the IGGY disappeared without a trace, or that we had nothing to do with it.”

Detroit stuck his hand into his toolbag, momentarily startled to find squishy cold frogs in there, and emerged with five of them stuck to his arm and a small vial between thumb and forefinger.

“Here’s our sample,” he said. “Scan and log it now.”

“An IGGY? You have one?! What’s it do?”

“Multi-species calming agent.”

“Why do you even have this?”

“I once had to service a unit with a ninehundred-pound Nurum Cha stuck in it. It kicked out two of my teeth and broke three ribs before I got it free enough for it to stop panicking. Ever since then I’ve kept this, just in case.”

“Well,” Emmer said. He took the vial, and in the same motion managed to dump his frogs into Detroit’s hands. “What? You’re the frog keeper, Earth boy. Put them away and meet me in Vissock’s office in four minutes.”

Detroit slung his toolbag over his back and grabbed a wallbar, propelling himself down the ring toward a connecting spoke to Central. Once through, he dropped into the administrative wing and the sweet relief of gravity. He headed to his closet, but when he pulled the lid off instead of the two dozen or so frogs he expected, there was just a giant ball the size of a cantaloupe stuck to the inside of the lid, legs sticking out and wiggling from all over the surface, a dozen eyes peering up at him.

He reached in, poked at the ball, but the frogs were so tightly stuck together he was afraid he’d hurt them if he tried harder to separate them. “Okay, that’s just weird and maybe a little gross, you guys,” he said. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to add more frogs to that mess, so he put the lid back down over the frog-ball and carefully closed up his toolbag with the new frogs safely inside. Then he picked up the bucket and made haste toward Vissock’s office.

She was sitting at her desk, Biner standing beside her, almost looming. Emmer had sunk into a chair. “About damned time,” Biner said as soon as Detroit entered the room.

Detroit handed his scanner to Vissock. She set it atop the readeye on her desk and waited as the data downloaded to her systems. Emmer’s wand sat beside it. Biner leaned forward, impatient.

“What was it? Who did it?”

“Most of it had cleared the system before we could detect it,” Emmer said. “I did get one sample from the Dourelian suite, but that’s probably coincidence.”

“Coincidence?” Biner said.

“That suite is farthest from the system filters. Circulation is slightly less efficient the farther away you are from central.” Emmer took the vial out of his pocket and set it on the desk.

Biner stepped back in alarm. “It’s inert now,” Emmer added after a few seconds, and Biner’s scowl deepened.

“Do we know what it is?” Vissock asked.

“No idea,” Detroit said. “We don’t have the tech to deep-scan IGGYs.”

“The Alliance does,” Biner said. “You’re certain it’s inert?” He picked up the vial carefully.

“Almost entirely, yes,” Emmer said.

Biner dropped it hastily into his personal case. “I’m not done with the three of you,” he said and stomped out of Vissock’s office. Emmer tipped his chair backward and reached out, sliding the door shut after him.

Vissock put her chin in her hand and stared at the two of them. “So this is something I shouldn’t worry about?” she asked.

“I’m sure Biner is entirely competent at handling this himself, and that no more such incidents are likely,” Emmer said.

“I need to know about Bom,” Detroit blurted out.

“What?” Vissock asked.

“The planet the Gaians and the Skriknatti are negotiating over.”

“It’s hardly negotiating. It’s in the Alliance Treaty with Skriknat that if there’s a competing claim against a Bounds world, they’ll participate in moderated talks. The Gaians want the planet preserved because of its unique ecosystem, the Skriknatti aren’t going to give it to them, and after today’s session they’ll have met their obligation according to the treaty and will leave. Biner could push for a compromise of some sort, but he can’t afford to alienate Skriknat right now.”

“And what happens to Bom if the Skriknatti keep it?”

“They’re going to strip it of atmosphere, water, and any valuable elements. Whatever’s left will be up for grabs to anyone who still wants it,” Vissock said.

“Can I talk to the Gaian representative?”

“Without Biner’s permission and presence? No,” Vissock said. “I can’t authorize that over broken toilets.”

“What if it’s more than that?”

“Like what? The frogs? We don’t have any idea where they came from! They might have nothing to do with Bom, or any of this.”

“They were in both the Gaian and Skriknatti quarters,” Emmer chipped in. “No other private suites. That does seem to point to a connection.”

“I just want to ask,” Detroit said. “I’m not going to accuse anyone of anything. I need to know if they’re going to get wiped out.”

Vissock looked unhappy. “The last round of talks started five minutes ago, and I can’t justify interrupting for a nuisance problem. It’s too late.”

Detroit sighed. “I think it’s best if I resign my employment now, so that I am no longer your responsibility,” he said. He grabbed his toolbag and reached for his bucket, then froze. “—Shit.”

“Now what?!” Vissock stood up.

Detroit pulled the lid off his bucket and held it up. There was a fist-sized circular hole in it, and the ball of frogs was gone. Emmer grabbed his wand off the desk and waved it over the lid. “Whoa!”

he said. “Unknown organic traces. Off the charts corrosive.”

“That,” Vissock said, “is no longer a nuisance. What if one burnt its way through the hull? Or into a critical system like life support? We need to know where these things came from and how to neutralize them before they hit something vital.”

Detroit and Emmer followed Vissock out of her office. She moved at a half-run until she hit the security station outside the spoke to the conference zone. “They’re with me,” Vissock said before the guard could even speak.

“I still need to call Commander Biner, Ma’am,” the guard said. “If negotiations are in progress

—”

“This is a station security problem, and last I knew, you worked for the station, not the Alliance,”

Vissock said. “Wherever Administrator Biner is, you can tell him to meet us in the Gaia-Skriknat talks.”

“He is already there, Ma’am,” the guard said.

“That’ll simplify things,” Vissock said and pushed past him.

Gravity grew lighter until they were moving horizontally by pulling themselves along wall-bars.

Detroit glanced up and saw a frog on the ceiling above them. He plucked it free as he passed, tucking it into his toolbag with the others. He collected six more along the walls, before the corridor let them out into the conference zone. All the frogs had been heading in the same direction.

Vissock stopped in front of a conference room. “Let me do the talking,” she said and used her pass and handprint to override the door lock.

Biner was floundering to get out of his grippy chair, his face beet-red as they floated through the door. The Gaian representative stared at them from her seat, while the most that Detroit could say definitively about the Skriknatti is that it seemed to be facing them. “This is an outrage!” Biner shouted.

“There is a security situation,” Vissock said.

“I hear no alarms!”

“It hasn’t reached that point,” Vissock said.

“Yet. We’re trying to stop it before it does.”

The Skriknatti made an unpleasant squeaky sound and a small orb-shaped device hovering in front of it lit up. “There is no point in continuing regardless,” it said. “We have met our obligation to listen and we are not compelled to yield.”

“There is a potential for sentient life on Bom!” the Gaian said.

“It holds no value,” the Skriknatti answered.

“There already is sentient life,” Detroit spoke up from where he floated beside the door.

“Mr. Hammersmith, you are a toilet repairman,” Biner said. “You are neither qualified to speak nor welcome to do so. Open your mouth again, and I’ll have you fired.”

“I’ve already quit,” Detroit said. He reached into his toolbag and pulled out one of the frogs.

“And I’m not speaking for myself.”

The Skriknatti hissed. “Pests,” it said. “Parasites.” It stuck a claw up under a red scale and flung a small green shape toward the wall flash recycler. “They burn.”

Emmer kicked off from the wall, managing to grab the frog before it could go into the incinerator.

“What is that thing?” Biner asked. “Is that a frog?”

“They’re from Bom,” Detroit said. “Someone’s been flushing them down the toilets, probably because they burn.”

Biner stared at Vissock. “This is your security situation? Frogs?”

“They secrete an incredibly corrosive substance,” Vissock said. “If any of them had gotten into something more vital than the toilets...”

Biner seemed to accept that point. “How did they get here?” He looked at the Skriknatti.

“We did not bring them,” the Skriknatti said.

Everyone looked at the Gaian. She shrunk in her seat a little. “It wasn’t intentional,” she said. “I conducted our final survey there myself and then came straight here. We didn’t detect anything on our ship, but... I don’t know. Suddenly they were everywhere. I tried to contain them, but they kept making holes in everything I put them in.”

“And you didn’t warn us?” Vissock said. “Didn’t you think that might be dangerous?”

“I didn’t want to risk weakening our position,” she said.

“You have no position to weaken,” the Skriknatti said. “We are done with these talks, and the sooner we have scraped that planet down to bare rock the more satisfied we will be. Our claim has not been challenged.”

“I challenge it!” the Gaian said.

The Skriknatti puffed up, scales standing out like a pinecone having a temper tantrum. “You would fight us for it? Combat, you and I?”

“We do not fight!” The Gaian said. “We are a peaceful assembly of civilized people!”

The Skriknatti’s scales settled again. “Then our claim has not been challenged.”

“What would fighting you include?” Detroit asked, trying to remember if he had his good pipe-clamp in his bag. “I mean, would we use weapons?”

“It would be pure body combat, no weapons, no rules except to be superior. But you have no basis for a claim,” the Skriknatti said. It clicked its claws together. “Nor would you win.”

“Well, shit,” Detroit said. He figured the Skriknatti was right on that; even though Detroit was a full half-meter taller, the alien had armor and claws.

Biner tapped his pad, angrily. “We should conclude this, so we can let Station Commander Vissock and her team get back to the important business of trying to contain this infestation,” he said.

“I am sending the closing text to each of your systems...”

Detroit stared down sadly at the frog on his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Deet, it said. Bom.

As if in echo, tiny voices chirped up from his toolbag. Deet deet bom deet!

Biner glanced over at him, frowning. Outside the door came a sudden, deafening chorus of DEET

DEET BOM BOM BOM DEET BOM.

Detroit opened the door.

Frogs streamed into the room, along the walls and ceiling and floor. In the center was the frog ball that had escaped his bucket, easily ten times its previous size, and the seething mass of legs and eyes had taken on the rough semblence of a single giant frog. It leapt, landing on the center of the desk and sticking there. “BOM,” it said in perfectly synchronized chorus. A hundred eyes blinked, fixing at last on the Skriknatti. Distinctly, it said, “BOM. SHALLENDS.”

The Skriknatti let out a squeal that the orb translated into laughter. “The parasite would challenge us?” it said.

“That’s not fair—” Detroit said.

“It is a valid claim,” the Skriknatti said. It raised one thick forelimb, bunching its cluster of claws together into a shape like an ice pick.

Frogs jumped onto the desk around the big one. They pressed against it, adding themselves to the mass. The frog-shape grew bigger. The frogs from Detroit’s toolbox, the one on his finger, the one in Emmer’s hand, all leapt to the desk and joined in. In less than a minute, no single frogs remained unattached, and their collective form was now nearly as large as the Skriknatti itself.

The Skriknatti raised its other three arms, braced itself against the far desk, and began to lunge.

The multi-frog moved faster. It sprang forward, a crude approximation of a mouth appearing and opening wide, and engulfed the entire head of the Skriknatti. The alien flailed, the translation orb rendering terrible sounds into equally terrible sounds, as its claws hacked at the frog. Where it hit, small frogs fell out of the mass, then leapt back on.

The Skriknatti gave one last, violent twitch, then went still.

The giant frog dissolved into a rain of tiny frogs, spreading in a pool around the Skriknatti. When

Detroit could see through the mass, he winced and turned away; the part of the Skriknatti that had been inside the frog’s mouth was just gone, a melted brownblack goo enveloping the stubby top of its body.

“Ew,” Emmer said.

Biner stared at it, then at Detroit, the Gaian, then back at it. “The provisions for combat were dictated by the leadership of Skriknat,” he said at last, his voice hoarse. “By those terms, I think we can declare the native life of Bom has successfully asserted its superior claim to its own planet. You will all be listed as witnesses to this sequence of events. I expect there will be questions.”

“Does this mean we’ll be granted conservatorship of Bom?” the Gaian asked.

“No,” Biner said. “You want it, you take it up with them.” He jerked his thumb towards the frogs, who were managing to drift to various surfaces in the room. “In the meantime, be grateful I’m not locking you up for smuggling dangerous, unauthorized life forms onto the station.”

“Deet,” the frogs said. “Deet deet deet bom freend.”

“Freend?” Detroit asked.

“Friend, I think?” Vissock said.

Biner coughed. “I have the personal authority to compel any citizen into service in emergency situations, and I am doing so. Congratulations, Mr. Hammersmith. I am officially appointing you acting Alliance liaison to Bom.”

“I’m a toilet repairman!” Detroit protested. “And I’m retired!”

“Then you should have stuck with toilets and retirement, shouldn’t you?” Biner retorted. “Thanks to your friends, after I explain to the Skriknatti that their senior ambassador got his head eaten in combat and they’ve lost an entire planet’s resource as a result, I’m going to have to start trade negotiations over from scratch. I’m sure you aren’t sympathetic to this, but it took me years to get our late ambassador as pleasantly socialized as he was. So while I try to figure out how to pick up the pieces from this mess, you can get all these frogs off this station and back where they belong.”

“What if I refuse? Or if I contest the post?” Detroit said. He crossed his arms over his chest, doing his best to look adamant and unmovable. One by one, frogs began leaping from the desk and attaching themselves to his shirt.

“Then I can certainly find some other people here on the station to blame for this disaster,” Biner said, looking meaningfully over at Vissock and Emmer. “Shall I start listing the potential charges?”

Detroit winced. “How long?” he said. Biner picked up his pad. “I have three-quarters of a standard left until I retire myself,” he said. “After that, take it up with my replacement. Oh, and Mr.

Hammersmith?”

“Yes?” he asked.

“Get the hell out of my conference room.”

“Bom go,” the frog added, and damned if the thing didn’t sound smug about it.

Dreams of the Rocket Men

C. Stuart Hardwick | 7404 words

Most folks called him Mr. Coanda, but to us, growing up, he was just the Rocket Man. Saturdays, my brother Keith and I would ride our bikes through the woods to where the barbed wire marking his land had been absorbed by the bark of a towering oak. A hanging muscadine vine made a platform sturdy enough for many a bouncing adventure, and the boughs of a nearby cottonwood formed the rooms of our imagined space cruiser and later the foundation of a serviceable, if piecemeal, tree-house. From this vantage point, we would often spy as the Rocket Man unwittingly led our space fleet into battle, firing small rockets from a concrete pad that must once have been part of a farm building.

We’d watch him prepare, imagining the evil plans behind his latest assault or the glory to be had in its wake. Then we’d answer his volley with all our imagined wonder weapons, all the more real we thought, for the wafting smell of sulfur, gunpowder, and burnt rubber.

One autumn day, Halloween week when I was thirteen, Daddy turned off the highway a bit early and wound through the trees and up to a dark, cedar house like those where I imagined park rangers might live. The effect was completed by unkempt flowerbeds lined with rocks and animal skulls, and feeders ringed by moldering seed husks. Daddy had paid Mr. Coanda to make or repair some part for our garden tractor, and he walked us around the house, through a gate secured with a loop of steel wire, and out to the unpainted barn where Mr. Coanda was working.

While the two men talked, my brother and I stared into the barn’s shadowed recesses, where strange and fancy machines of unimaginable purpose stood sentry over countless dusty and forgotten-looking rocket parts. There were nose cones and tail fins and funnel-shaped nozzles, and even the odd bit of electronic gear. When Mr. Coanda had explained to Daddy whatever needed explaining, he noticed our prying eyes and asked if we were interested in rockets. If it was all right with Daddy, he said, we were welcome to come back on Saturday, and he would show us how to make one.

I could hardly think of my schoolwork that week, but when Saturday finally came, all he showed us was how to make pop bottles fly with compressed air and water and then with vinegar and soda. I was a little disappointed, but the ice had been broken. Keith and I became regular guests, soon building our own rockets from balsa and cardboard and sending them up under Mr. Coanda’s guidance. He taught us how to measure a rocket’s altitude and trajectory and how to improve its performance through careful tinkering and even more careful note-taking. He even let us launch one of his own big multi-stagers, a yellow-striped giant with homemade motors and an onboard camera.

When the Geminids passed, we helped him mulch his strawberry plants and live-trap marauding rabbits. By the Perseids, we had learned to make our own exploding skyrockets and roast popcorn right on the cob. The sun swept on through the zodiac. Keith’s dreams turned from rockets to football and girls, mine from store-bought model kits to experimental designs of my own. The woods grew lush, then dry and brown, then dappled again with buds. Then, over Easter break, I was helping Mr.

Coanda mend a barn door hinge when the phone rang inside his house. It was Daddy. Momma and Keith had been in a wreck and were being flown down to Houston. Daddy said they’d be fine, but he needed to go for a few days and would it be okay if I stayed with Mr. Coanda.

That night, Mr. Coanda made chili, then drove me home to pick up clothes and a toothbrush. He stood in the doorway of our cramped little bedroom and waited while I gathered my things. Keith’s wall was decorated with hot cars and women, mine with robots and sci-fi movie stills. I’d made a
shelf over my bed on which I’d placed every rocket I could get hold of, including Mr. Coanda’s pop bottles and models. When he saw these, he stood still and quiet like grownups did when they were trying to decide whether to say something.

Finally, he stepped inside and pulled the space ship chain pull that worked the ceiling fan light.

“This looks like my room when I was little,” he said. His blue eyes, in that moment, were a young boy’s eyes, like lights on Christmas morning. The crags and valleys of his withered cheeks shone all the deeper beneath them.

“I’m not little,” I said.

He laughed. “Nothing wrong with being little, son. Less mass to boost into orbit.”

I was to stay the week. In the morning, he saw me onto the bus and was waiting when it came back, just like Momma used to do. Monday passed without word, and he let me stay up watching movies. Tuesday night, he was showing me how to slice a tomato without crushing the pulp when the phone rang once again. He answered, then stepped in the back room and shut the door. He talked for a while in hushed tones. A decision was being debated, and when he stepped out, he was dulleyed and gray, and he told me my momma was dead.

He patted my shoulder and said, “Your pa says he’d have liked you to be there, but she never...”

From what I’d been told and what I hadn’t, it wasn’t really a surprise, but some things you can never prepare for. Though I didn’t break down and cry exactly, I felt a torrent down my cheeks and a melon-sized lump in my throat.

Mr. Coanda said, “Are you...? Do you folks go to...?” Then he sighed and put me in a chair and set about finishing our dinner. I watched as he added the tomatoes to a sauce and put the knife and cutting board away. As he wiped up the spillage, he said, “You know Jimmy, I was in a plane crash once.”

I raised a questioning brow, but I couldn’t speak for the lump.

He nodded. “Brand new twin engine turbofan, cracked a blade climbing out of Spokane. Turns out the pilot misread the instruments and shut down the wrong engine.”

Having finished his cleaning and toweled off his hands, he pulled out a chair from the table and straddled it to sit. “Quietest thing you ever heard, being in the air with a hundred and forty-three people, no engines, just the wind whistling by. When I saw a steeple pass above the wingtip, I knew we weren’t going to make it.”

I didn’t know why he was telling me this, but I had to ask, “What happened?”

“We crashed. Me and my wife and my baby boy. And you know what I was thinking, just at the end?”

I didn’t.

“Who’s going to mow the grass?”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “What?”

“We had this cranky old push mower that Millie could never start. I knew I was going to die, and all I could think was, who will cut the grass, now I’m gone? Only I didn’t die. The cabin split right at our feet. I was at the window, and the wall must have shielded me some but...”

“I’m so sorry.”

He waved a dismissive hand. “It was a long time ago. I won’t say you ever get over it, but you get used to it eventually. Anyhow, it was a similar thing, a stupid accident. But folks’ll come around and say it’s the Lord’s will, part of his great plan.... How that’s supposed to be better, I never did know.

Maybe it just feels better to them because they don’t know what else to say. But I’ll tell you what might help, is to remember that everybody dies, but our lives are like flames passed from candle to
candle. The light’s been burning now for millions of years. Your momma carried it for her little while, and you’ll carry it for yours—you and your brother and all those kids she taught and helped point in new directions. And I expect that’s what she was thinking, when she knew they were going to crash, that you’d all be here to carry the flame.”

That helped.

The next morning, Mr. Coanda took me out to the barn and had me help him move an old refrigerator and pry open a large wooden crate. Inside, all packed in gray foam blocks, were parts for a rocket unlike any I’d ever seen. It had three stages, all gleaming aluminum, and when stacked five feet high on a plywood stand, it had a shape like a rifle bullet projecting from one end of an empty toilet paper roll.

“Wow!” I said, “That’s a real monster. What is it?”

He chuckled a bit. “Just a candle.”

I helped him carry the rocket parts down through the woods to the pasture and a cinderblock workshop near his launchpad. We mixed up a gray, putty-like fuel for the first two stages and pressed clay and black power into a cardboard tube for the third.

Mr. Coanda picked up the first stage with his fingers splayed wide over the fins as he pressed tape to an electric igniter. “So what would you say is special about this rocket?”

The first stage seemed like an ordinary booster, although unusually squat. The third, upper, stage was no different from rockets I had built myself except for the elongated motor and thin-walled metal construction. The second stage, though, was a tube within a tube, a fact more conspicuous now with the propellant core in place.

“The second stage, right?”

“Very good.” He tapped the outer lip of the stage. “This is a ram intake. It’s not a true ramjet, but a ducted rocket.”

He explained how the rocket exhaust would suck in air through the outer tube, compress it, and blow it out at high speed.

“Same idea as a propeller on an airplane,” he said. “When you’re traveling through the air, why not push against it along the way? Build a rocket that can do that like an airplane, and you’ve got something.”

He set the booster down to free his hands for punctuation. “When I was your age,” he said, “I thought I’d wind up on the Moon. I thought we’d fly there in sleek spaceliners and vacation on Mars.

All our dreams seemed before us, and we never thought about the economics behind them. But the reality is, space travel is expensive, and that’s mostly due to the boosters—the cost of climbing the gravity well.”

He said that in space travel, the cost of a launch is determined by all kinds of things, not just the weight of machinery, fuel, and oxidizer, but also the aerodynamics and trajectory which control how much air resistance and gravity a rocket must fight before it reaches orbit.

“Everything’s a trade-off,” he said. “The Saturn V carried us to the Moon and did it in under a decade, but it consumed fifteen tons of propellant every second, and everything scaled up to match.”

“Wasn’t the space shuttle supposed to be cheaper?”

“Sure, and it was a fine piece of engineering, but...” His eyes glazed over, and I could see he was revisiting the past. “The shuttle burned hydrogen, which is bulky as hell. That meant a large external tank to drag through the air and accelerate up to orbital speed. It had airplane parts that are just dead weight on a space ship. Hell, the tires weighed as much as the astronauts. It was meant to be a
reusable spaceliner. Instead, it was a space station you had to launch over and over again. When the Russians got hold of the design, they thought it must be a smokescreen for an orbital bomber. It lost sight of the prize, see, dollars per pound to orbit.”

I looked at the monster rocket. “So is this the solution?”

“This? No. This is just a clue. It’s a working scale model of a clever missile the Russians built back in the 1950’s.”

He had asked me to fit a tiny camera into a window below the nose cone. Now he added a transmitter, battery, and chute.

As we carried the stages out to the pad, he continued. “To really open up space,” he said, “will take hybridization of ideas. Maybe highflying planes to carry the rockets, maybe rail launchers for freight, maybe power beams shot from the ground, hell, I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know, nobody does. We might as well give it up.”

“But that’s the wrong way to look at it, Jimmy. We got into the air when the Wright brothers broke down the problem: propulsion, lift, control. They weren’t the smartest or the richest fellows, but they were the first to break it down and take the pieces in turn. Space is no different. We’ll get the cost down by reexamining all the pieces. Look at oxygen, the heaviest part of any conventional booster.

There’s already oxygen in the air, so some people want to build spaceplanes that linger in the upper atmosphere gobbling it up until they’re close to orbital speed. But then there’s so much heating and drag see, and you have to fly for so long, the fuel weighs as much as the oxygen saved. Everything’s a trade-off. Look at this ducted rocket. Instead of just spitting out tons of propellant every second, it grabs some of the air and claws its way up like a cartoon coyote up a falling length of rope.”

I laughed, prompting him to add, “Well that could actually work, you know, if you could only pull the rope fast enough!”

I held the second stage while he fit the third into place. “The trouble is, the duct adds weight. Turn it into a ramjet and you get more thrust, so the weight doesn’t hurt quite as much. But then you need a pre-booster to reach supersonic speed before the ramjet can work.”

“Another trade-off,” I said.

“Now you’ve got it.” He looked from my hands to the rocket, indicating where I should hold on.

I moved accordingly. “So what’s the answer?”

He twisted the stages between his hands to check for snugness, then ran his eyes up the stack. “We just have to find the right tradeoffs.”

The launch was anticlimactic, the recovery, an adventure. The video, which we viewed in the house over bowls of popcorn and chili, was hypnotic. The rocket climbed and climbed. As it staged and staged again, the ground slowly warped into a fisheye ball. When the propellant finally ran out, the Earth was just an azure band beneath the inky black of space.

Mr. Coanda let a handful of popcorn fall back into the bowl. “Holy hell,” he said, “if that ain’t a beautiful sight.”

I was similarly entranced. “How high do you figure we went?”

“I don’t have to figure. I have data. Ah... sixty-three thousand feet.”

“Wow! That’s almost in space!”

“Not quite. Minimum orbit’s eight times higher, and then you have to accelerate to orbital velocity in order to stay there.”

I stared at the glowing earthscape.

“Still...” “Still,” he said, and popped the top off a Nehi. “You’ll get there one of these days.”

“You think?”

“Sure you will. You’ll see.”

Keith came home in a wheelchair and spent two years relearning how to walk. I spent that time with Mr. Coanda, learning how to fly. He taught me Tsiolkovsky’s equations and the principles of rocketry, from the V2 to the shuttle. He showed me how engines work, how their parts are cooled and lubricated, and how waste energy from one step is often reused to drive another, and he explained how different engines meet different needs. Ramjets are simpler than turbojets but only work in a narrow range of speeds.

Scramjets are much faster, but produce little thrust for their weight. Aerospikes, a sort of inside-out rocket motor, offer better low altitude performance, but have weight and cooling issues. The litany of trade-offs was endless, and it often brought us around to his favorite design, the engine for the infamous Blackbird, the SR-71 spyplane.

“Look at this,” he said in one early session. He’d chalked out what looked like a drainpipe with a jet engine inside one end and a cone projecting from the other. “The ram moves out of the way at low speed so the turbojet can operate, then at supersonic speeds, diverts most of the flow into the afterburner. Now that’s a hybrid—the world’s first turboramjet!”

The engine was complex, with all kinds of flaps and doors and ducts to adjust its operation in flight, and it was no orbital booster. But with 1950’s technology, it could fly from a dead stop on the runway clear to the edge of space. It thrilled Mr. Coanda to no end, and learning it all kept me busy while I adapted to the loss of my mother. My lessons weren’t all theoretical, though. We went on launching rockets in the pattern of his Russian design. He called them sounding rockets and fitted them with nacelles and windows to test his ideas, and electronics to record the results. In an effort to attain higher speeds, he once had me lash a rocket to a set of weather balloons so it could fire toward the ground from seventy thousand feet. He got the data he needed but made a four-foot crater in the woods behind the garden. We never did that again.

Through a former colleague, Mr. Coanda had access to a laser sintering machine that could print computer-designed components direct into high-performance alloys. It was the highlight of my summer when he took me into town to see it work. Through a quartz observation window, we watched as metallic traces appeared in a bed of power, and then were buried one after the other by a mechanical sweeping wand.

Each trace added a sliver of substance to an emerging whole, but not until the process finished and the dust was dug away, could I see the arrayed components of what was clearly a new, more complex, second stage for his rocket. This one was a hybrid of old and new. Instead of a solid rocket motor core, it would be liquid fueled, and instead of a conventional rocket, there was a pointed cone threaded to screw into the duct where the nozzle should be.

From his lectures, I knew what that meant. “It’s an aerospike engine!”

Mr. Coanda tapped the side of his nose. “It’s a clue. It still needs a first stage booster, but with thrust from the spike and the ramjet together, I reckon it can pass Mach 5. That’s fast enough, I need Ralph here to coat the leading edges with ceramic to keep them from melting.” He gave a nod to the lab-coated technician who’d been operating the machine.

Ralph was a tidy, redheaded man with a neatly trimmed goatee. “It’s your money,” he said. “Come on son, help me wrap up these parts.”

Before we could put Coanda’s investment to the test, we first had to resuscitate a tiny liquid
oxygen plant moldering behind his workshop. He’d built it before he retired— “tinkered it together,”

he said—from a helicopter engine and an assortment of modified turbocompressor parts. Liquid air, he explained, is made by successively compressing, cooling, and expanding air until it fractions into liquid components. It requires heavy industrial machinery to produce in bulk, but he thought it should be possible to use jet engine technology to compress the process into something light enough to carry along on a booster.

“And it works terrific,” he said. “It’ll never produce enough LOX to do the whole job alone, but that’s another trade-off. If it can do much better than pay its own way, then—”

“You don’t need as big a rocket.”

He winked. “Exactly, and it works out that to get the LOX, you also produce a large volume of super-cold nitrogen that can help with cooling. If you then find a use for the superheated waste air, say to insulate your combustion surfaces, it might make a serious contribution to a more efficient booster.”

We got the plant working and collected enough liquid oxygen to test fire the engine. Ralph—Mr.

Phillips at the fabrication shop—had given the spike a standard bakedon ceramic coating to protect it from hot rocket exhaust, but it immediately became clear that when the engine was throttled to full power, this essential protection just crumbled away. This was serious, but Mr. Coanda took it in stride. Testing proceeded. The print run had included spare parts, so he just swapped out the spike cones as they eroded. That was enough for some low power tests and gave him the data he needed to return to his computerized drawing board.

While he refined his design ideas, I pursued one of my own. If we could get a machine to lay down metal alloy a few atoms at a time, I thought, maybe we could coax it to blend in some silica and print the heat shield right into the components. I paid Ralph Phillips a visit and bent his arm by telling him the experiments I needed were for the science fair.

First, we tried printing a simple flat washer and used a service probe to drop a pinch of silica into its upper surface. It worked okay until the machine cooled down. Then Mr. Phillips fished out the washer with tongs and set it under an articulated magnifier lamp. “I was afraid of that,” he said,

“Your idea worked, but the materials have different coefficients of expansion.” He slid to the side to let me look through the magnifier. The coating was crazed like an old master’s painting.

He ran his fingers through his shabby goatee. “I have a book here... somewhere...” He rummaged through his desk, then the adjoining office, until he found what he was looking for. “You want a science fair project? This book contains everything they learned making tiles for the space shuttle and then some. Some of it’s too complex for us to do here, but if you can think up a way to do it in this machine, I’ll order the materials and let you burn it, within reason. You make it work, and you can write your own ticket. What do you say?”

I could hardly say no. That summer, we ran over sixty tests, enough that I thought I’d surely overstayed my welcome. The solution finally came in the fall, with blending the margin between the metal and silica, then doping the layers with scandium and zirconium dioxide to improve their bonding and strength. To do all this, Mr. Phillips had to consult with a physicist for advice and bolt a handmade silica hopper inside the cabinet of the very expensive sintering machine. When we finally got it all to work, all we really had to show for our effort was a shiny black disk of metal. But we had built the hopper just big enough and just tricked out enough to make Mr. Coanda’s aerospike.

After Momma died, I’d taken on a couple of her tutoring students and that had grown into a regular job. Between that and my time in the fabrication shop, I hadn’t been to Mr. Coanda’s much since
spring. I knew he had test-fired a ducted aerospike engine meant for first stage liftoff and two disappointing scramjet hybrids he hoped would serve at higher speeds and altitudes. I knew what he was doing. He hoped to achieve a single stage to orbit by building a tunable air and LOX breathing super-hybrid engine. He didn’t have the resources to build and test it as a single functioning unit, so he was breaking it down and testing the various flight modes it would have to support, just like the Wright brothers had done.

I didn’t go immediately to show him the new spike cone. Saturday was his birthday and Daddy had invited him over for cake and a movie on our new giant screen. I bought a nice gift box, wrapped up the spike like a Fabergé egg, and tied it up in a bow. Saturday came, then the appointed time. The kitchen filled with sounds of cooking and then with tidying and cleaning. But instead of the rumble of Mr. Coanda’s pickup, I heard the bleat of my phone from the bedroom. At the other end was Ralph Phillips, from the shop.

“Jim?”

“Yes sir?”

“Jim, have you seen George lately?”

“George? Oh, no sir, I—”

“He was in here today with a file I’ve already printed for him twice, that first one you two tested last year. Big burns like these are expensive, and when I asked about it, he blew up at me—acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. We go back a long way, me and George. I’d do anything for him, but I’m worried.”

My heart sank. I’d already seen the signs: the duplicate subscriptions and purchases, the forgotten experiments, the tendency to put me in charge of things beyond my age and experience. I’d thought he was just pushing me. I’d hoped that was all, but I’d known better. Now I knew I had to say something and I worried, after the call, just how he’d react.

Daddy said he’d go with me. I told him to finish the cake, then drove my little Volkswagen over to Mr. Coanda’s with the giftwrapped aerospike and a sack of pecans Daddy had collected from our trees out back. When I climbed Mr. Coanda’s steps, it was as if for the last time. I noticed how the porch had grown crowded with neglected pots, how the algae-green boards had crumbled from its edge, how the screen door screeched when the spring slammed it shut behind me.

Mr. Coanda was in his study, a tiny room off the kitchen that in most houses built in the thirties and added on to over the years, might have been a bedroom or larder.

“Come in here, James. Put that down.”

In all the years I’d known him, he’d never called me James. He sat in the plain leather office chair Daddy’d bought him when the wicker came out of the old one. The computer glowed by the open window, on the little wooden desk he always said had been made for a typewriter. The bigger table, a big drafting board he mostly left locked flat to serve as a workbench, was strewn with plans and papers. He tossed a few more into this mix and rested his elbows on the table edge.

I stepped up to the table, resisting the urge to straighten. Some of the papers were receipts from the fabrication shop going back over a year.

His eyes glistened. His voice was low and flat. “I yelled at Ralph today.”

“You’re just slowing down, that’s all.”

“Don’t patronize me, boy! You think I’m so far gone I can’t see where I’m standing?” He smacked the table hard enough to nudge it out of level. His outburst struck like a physical blow. In all the time I’d known him, he’d never once raised his voice.

He frowned and stared at the table, then turned in his chair. Behind the keyboard, he had two
bottles of Nehi. He popped one open and handed it to me. Grape scent mixed with the woodsy breeze through the window. “I’m not talking about a little tremor, Jimmy, or forgetting where I keep the wasp spray.”

Several times lately, I’d had to remind him that, in the time I had known him, it had always been in the kitchen, and not the washroom as he often remembered.

He stretched to drop the opener in a drawer, and the floor made a loud creak. He looked down but instead of commenting on the noise said, “I used to stay on top of things. I used to...”

His long fingers worked around the neck of his bottle like they didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“Have you ridden along the fence line lately, like you and your brother used to do?”

“No sir.”

“The other day, I found a meth lab hid out in the woods there...”

He had started to point through the window and say, “just out past the pecan tree.” I’d heard this story before, and it wasn’t “the other day.”

He took a quick sip and set the bottle back down, cradling it between his hands. “I’ve outlived it all, Jimmy. My dreams, this place, and finally the old noggin. Not much left after that.”

I looked up, but he spoke before I could say anything. “And don’t say nothing about heaven. You know I don’t believe that hooey. And anyway, after a man’s lost his marbles, even St. Peter can’t cram

’em back inside, and nobody can tell me different.”

He took another sip.

“It’s going,” he said, tapping his fingers against his forehead, “and when it’s gone, it’s gone, that’s all. The flame has to pass to you.” He turned and looked out the window. “I’d have loved to have made it to the Moon, though,” he said. “Returned the dust inside these bones to the stars from which it came.”

He swiveled back around. His eyes found tear marks on my cheek. “Don’t misunderstand me, boy.”

“Sir?”

“You don’t owe me anything. I didn’t teach you all this so you could finish my life’s work.”

“It’s good work.”

He smiled and sipped his Nehi. “Damn straight it’s good work. And good work always gets done by somebody or other—when the time is right. No, I taught you because that’s all I had to pass on.

You’re welcome to carry on where I left off if that’s your passion.

If it ain’t, though, don’t do it because it was mine. Every man has to follow his own dreams, Jimmy.

Wherever yours lead you, I’m proud of you, and your pa’s proud.”

He set down the empty with a clunk. “What’s that?” He was looking at the present, still cradled in my hand.

“It’s... for your birthday.”

“My... but that was... Open it for me, will you?”

I opened it. I pulled off the ribbon and the lid and set it on the desk before him with the wrappings drawn aside. He stared down and reached his hand to turn the box.

He pinched the cone by its edges and held it up to the light. “Remarkable.” He tapped his nail against the impervious surface. “Tell me all about it.”

I told him.

“Well that’s as fine a science fair project as I believe I’m likely to see,” he said. “You do have a project, don’t you?”

“Um... yessir.” I had all the data, anyway.

Rain started pattering against the windowsill. He rose to lower the sash. “We were going to have cake.”

“Yessir.”

He smiled. “Drive me over. Come back early, and we’ll put your spike on the ducted first stage and see how it flies. If I remember my own name in the morning.”

The science fair project carried me to state, then to international, then through a whirlwind of dinners and photo ops. I had a job if I wanted one, before I’d even applied to college. I needed a broader grounding, though, so I headed for Stanford and four years of internship at Lockheed and Rocketdyne. In April of my senior year, my intern manager at Rocketdyne, Rob Curtis, approached me about a start-up that wanted to build a single stage to orbit engine using venture capital instead of waiting for government contracts. He said they knew about my science fair win, and if I was interested, he’d come along and help me assemble a team. I said I’d think about it and flew home for the break, eager to get some advice.

Keith’s recovery had drawn him to medicine and to Austin. He had married my junior year, and Daddy was already there, fawning over his new grandson, but before I joined them, I wanted to see Mr. Coanda. We’d spent less and less time together as his world contracted and my own life narrowed toward college. After the birthday blowup, he’d hired a caregiver service, and Daddy had started keeping tabs on him. I still worried, though. I’d kept up a correspondence, even after his replies tailed off, and whenever I came home, I’d mow his grass or fix whatever was broken or help him to shell some pecans. The last year, he seldom spoke or gave any indication he knew me, but he seemed happy enough for the company.

I flew home and hailed a cab, but as soon as it pulled up at the end of that winding driveway, I knew he was gone. I knew the same way you know when the power’s out in the middle of the night—
by the relative amplification of trifles. Sorghum was sprouting in the feeders. A dog’s bark echoed from beyond the darkened house without so much as a squeaking floorboard or singing water pipe to mute it. The door was open, the rooms empty, except for a few chipped dishes and mounds of rubbish and clothing. Barest of all was the office. Everything was gone, a lifetime’s worth of dreams condensed onto paper and computer files and finally all swept away.

The wind chuffed up around the eaves and loosed a hail of acorns across the roof. A clank echoed in through the window glass and I saw that the barn had collapsed. It was as if the place had been holding its breath, and now that he was gone, had given in to decades of overdue collapse.

I ran outside, tears on my face, and looked for Mr. Coanda’s rockets, his motors, his tools—but everything was gone. Nothing remained but a few ruined bags of cement and the odd bit of wire or tail fin.

Down the hill, the workshop sat padlocked and empty. The only thing left of Mr. Coanda’s was the cryo-plant out back. The power was out, or I might have cranked it like I had two years ago when I’d found him gripping the tarp, refusing to be led back inside.

“Start,” he’d said when I pulled at his elbow.

He turned and looked with a little vigor in his eye. “Start,” he said again, his grip still firm on the tarpaulin.

I didn’t think it was a good idea, mechanically speaking, but it seemed best to play along. “It’s been sitting a long time. The injectors might be fouled.”

He made a dismissive noise. “Natural gas, ain’t it? Start her up. I wanna hear her.”

I grabbed the filthy canvas, careful of the mildew, and pulled it out of the way. With the fuel and compressor valves properly set, I turned the key. The little turbojet engine spun up, tinkitty-tink like cards on the spokes of a bicycle wheel until the centripetal force built enough to splay the compressor blades into their hangers. Then the pip, pip, pip of the igniter sparks till the flame caught and the compressors roared to life. With the escalating roar, there returned a little of the rocket man I’d so long admired. He smiled and gripped my shoulder and started shouting over the machine, telling me about its operation like a kid just back from his first circus. Then he fiddled with the controls as if performing some procedure unknown to me and finally throttled down and closed the fuel valve.

As the plant whirred down to a stop, he looked at me and back at it and back at me again.

“Jimmy.” It was a question, but his eyes shown with recognition.

“Yessir.”

He poked my sternum with his finger. “You won the Science Fair.”

“Yessir.”

He wrapped me in a bear hug and patted my back a few times. “I’m so proud of you boy. So proud...”

And that was that. He stood back, his eyes gray and distant, and ambled up the path toward the nurse, who’d run down from the house at our racket.

And now the same house sat empty, as if in appointment with doom.

There was a note on Daddy’s door. I called and got a Mr. Callahan, an estate lawyer who was eager to meet me—immediately if at all possible. It was a quarter till midnight when the yard filled with headlights turning off from the highway and then the squeaking clatter of Mr. Coanda’s pickup.

My heart jumped at the familiar sound, but of course it was only the lawyer. It seemed Mr. Coanda had arranged a reverse mortgage with a developer eager to have the property. The lawyer asked for my ID, then had me stand in the light for comparison. Then he exchanged my signature for a sealed manila envelope. Inside was a note in Mr. Coanda’s arrhythmic hand:

“My dear boy, Jimmy.

I’m having a few things packed up for you to have after I’m gone. It’s surprising, when it comes to it, how easy a lifetime can fit in a box, but remember what I told you. The flame isn’t in the box, it’s in you. Wherever it leads, there’s sure to be light.”

It was dated the year I started college.

The lawyer waited till I looked up, then said, “You’re meant to have the truck as well.” He walked around to the tailgate and pulled back a shiny blue tarp to reveal the crate from out in the barn. “Mr. Coanda left explicit instructions,” he said. “And I carried them out to the letter, but Jesus...”

He lifted the lid from the crate enough to expose the odd Russian missile, complete with Soviet insignia and olive green livery. The foam blocks had been disturbed, and the resulting spaces packed with paper files and blueprint tubes and a plastic bag full of thumb drives.

The lawyer was as pale as the moonlight. “I don’t know what you two were cooking up, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to. But I was afraid what might happen if someone found this, so I’ve had it in my garage for safe keeping.”

I looked again at the note. Below his signature, Mr. Coanda had added a postscript: “There will be a manifest with this note. If he breaks anything important, don’t tell him the missiles are fake.”

I laughed, a good parting joke between friends. Then I fed Mr. Callahan pizza and drove him
home to his family.

The Texas gulf sky is broadly chalked with crisscrosses of coral and cobalt. I wait by the hatch, mentally ticking off the others as they shuffle up the companionway and step aboard the nameless craft that will carry us up into orbit. Mists issue below, hissing from between eight tall nacelles ringing the gourdlike vessel, with engines still silent beneath their tall, black ram-cones. A service truck backs away and turns along the low earthen berm erected to protect neighboring pads from any debris thrown up by our departure. Beyond the berms and the terminal and the palm-lined fence, headlights speed south along the highway from Refugio.

In the old days, I used to drive Anna that way, south and then west into the nature preserve to watch the sunset. We’d have the chaise lounges in the truck bed, and we’d lay out eating strawberries and counting satellites and dreaming of days to come. We were fresh out of school, new to the world.

We didn’t know what dreams could be till we tangled our lives together.

That first full scale engine took six years and fourteen engineers, materials scientists, and propulsion specialists. It was complex and heavy, but it made up for it with all the right trade-offs. It was basically Coanda’s super-hybrid, but with an air-breathing gas turbine added to power the propellant pumps and an on-board cryo plant based on the one behind his workshop. The shroud used to direct combustion gases down along the aerospike also formed part of the duct. At liftoff, it gulped huge quantities of air to be shot out as reaction mass. At higher speeds, a ram moved up and fuel was injected to form a ramjet, the geometry of which continuously varied to produce thrust up to fifteen times the speed of sound. The onboard cryoplant supplied LOX to the aerospike and super-cold nitrogen to cool the engine and intake air during hypersonic flight. As in the SR-71, a complex arrangement of vents, rams, and bypass tubes tuned the engine to changes in altitude and speed. Even the trajectory was a trade-off, an S-shaped compromise between the ballistic flight of a conventional missile and the long flat climb of a spaceplane.

Overall, the atmosphere supplied 20 percent of the reaction mass and half the oxygen at liftoff.

The first test vehicle was a third lighter than a comparable conventional booster, and with the impregnated thermal protection I had helped pioneer, it could fly again and again. The stats only improved from there.

Now here I am, at the door to the fruits of our labors. I duck inside the cabin and climb to the loft, where I slide onto a fabric web couch. Launch attendants squeeze around us, cinching harnesses and telling jokes and patting my shoulder like a charm.

The hatch closes. I clap three times to attract everyone’s attention before the gab can get started.

“Listen.”

The turbines are spinning up, eight whirring voices that sing in beating cascades till the roar finally chokes their harmonics.

The bulkhead display screens flash a recorded prelaunch briefing, but I don’t pay much attention.

My thoughts wander back to Coanda, back to our shared dreams of spaceborn adventure, of ray-guns and Moon walks and daredevil launches on towers of billowing flame. Funny how time can shift the weights of all the things we treasure.

Single stage to orbit, reusable spacecraft made space travel less Neil Armstrong than George Jetson. It opened the door to a new space economy, and here we were in South Texas, further south than Cape Kennedy, with a clear shot over the gulf and easy highway access to the whole of the continent, from Matamoros to Port Huron. By the time Lockheed Propulsion made the buyout offer, Refugio was set to be the LAX of a new age, and we its founding elite. The future came rushing
headlong, but we were happily settled with a house outside Corpus and daughters in school and a love for kayaking the wilds of the marshes and bays along the coast.

We bankrolled the money. I went to work on the Refugio spaceport, Anna for the startups that sprang up around it like dandelions. Now they’re planning spaceports on the Yucatan Peninsula and Brazil’s Atlantic coast, and our eldest is building a third in northern Queensland. I have grandkids in California and Germany, and camping buddies with aerospace jobs south of the border. Space is the new frontier, but it’s still warm and green on the good Earth, and the Moon’s not the siren she once was.

Which is not to say I won’t enjoy the ride. I’m as eager as anyone to play in microgravity and drag my booted toes in the lunar regolith. I’ll ride over to the Sea of Tranquility and take all the souvenir photos, and I might even dream a floating monolith before I fly back home to Anna. But it’s not wanderlust that drives me up through the azure Texas night. Nor is it pride or national prestige, nor even George Coanda’s triple-fired, vacuum-packed, anti-static treated cinerary remains that have waited forty years to be laid to rest in the only fitting spot I can imagine.

No, I’m here for the kids, eight of my fellow travelers who are my guests at Camp Kitty-Hawk, where for twenty years we’ve brought students from around the world to use science and engineering to break down and realize their dreams. Each year we invite proposals for a different field of study.

There’s always an extended field trip, but only now is the infrastructure in place to allow for a trip to the Moon.

George would be thrilled. He’d listen to the snickering and the false bravado and the rude jokes and noises, and he’d smile the way he always did when it wasn’t yet time to speak.

They’re excited to be going. They think it’s cool, but they don’t yet have an inkling of the tradeoffs and sacrifices that have gotten mankind this far. That’s exactly what they’re here to learn.

The murmuring resumes. One of the girls says to another, “Shhh! The Rocket Man will hear you.”

I’ve run the camp now for longer then I worked in engineering, but to these kids and the world, I’ll always be the Rocket Man, a mythological hero from a golden age. And that’s fine by me. I’ll proudly wear that title while I fan the flames, till the next bearer comes along to change up the world behind me. It’s not the adventure I imagined for my life, but you never quite know where dreams will lead.

Nesting Dolls

Jacob A. Boyd | 8309 words

Garen and his little brother Blyte aren’t supposed to go inside. Garen and Blyte aren’t supposed to play near the hatch. They aren’t supposed to knock on its steel door and close their eyes and wait so their skins crawl as they pretend inside people are preparing to pop out and grab them.

Garen tells Blyte stories to work up his nerve.

Inside people are simple and mean. They never had we-think implants. Their dendrite beds haven’t been cultivated through careful eugenics and gene manipulation. They’ve been cooped up so long, it’s too late now. Their brains are old-form, mushy.

Instead of fungi, inside people eat inbred guinea pigs. They fight and fuck and eat meat.

With Blyte’s back to the hatch, Garen makes noises with his mouth like someone from inside is working the lock wheel. He scrapes his gold family ring along the gangway’s rail, imitating a knife on sharpening steel. He lowers his voice like a grown man’s and growls so Blyte opens his eyes and loses.

Garen is tall and lean and graceful. When the guard’s boots drum down the gangway as he hurries back from a piss, Garen runs faster than Blyte and makes it away free. His limbs obey him beautifully.

At their rendezvous point hidden near the humming data stacks, Garen gestures an all clear to Blyte, who lifts his shirt. Two angry purple welts mark Blyte’s back.

“Two laces?” Garen asks.

Blyte tucks in his shirt, brow furrowed as though with concentration he can hide his pain. “I didn’t even cry.”

“The guard had to make a report,” Garen says.

Wide, earnest eyes peer out from Blyte’s bashful face. “Nobody will know we were there.”

Garen concentrates and reaches his mind into the Think.

In the Think, Blyte’s think-sphere is so large that though he hangs like a nucleus at its center, he’s unmistakable. The Think’s vast, dark plane is illuminated by Blyte, Garen’s view of it extended by his proximity. No one else is in sight. Claustrophobic in his own sphere, Garen crawls up its inner surface and rolls toward Blyte. The Think’s terrain crackles under him like tearing Velcro. Ever so slightly, the Think’s plane bows under Blyte. Once Garen’s sphere touches Blyte’s, he tap-taps for entry. Blyte’s think-sphere brickles him out. Thrusting disembodied hands through his sphere, Garen breaches and leaves the Think to level eyes at Blyte, big-brother-to-little-brother, serious. Blyte gives a one-cheeked smile. When Garen reenters the Think, Blyte’s brickle has lowered. Garen passes inside Blyte’s sphere for head-to-head.

Blyte screws up his mouth while Garen strains and moves Blyte’s recent memories. Garen hardly notices, his concentration needed to get at the truth. Inside Blyte’s head, everything is solid and heavy.

The guard caught Blyte running from the hatch and leered into his face—hot breath and bad teeth.

“I heard two runners.”

The guard is a young man, face like a doughy fist. Fresh stitching on his uniform reads,

“SWENTON.”

“You’re going to tell me who you were with one way or another,” he said.

Swenton reached into the Think and bullied at Blyte’s sphere for head-to-head.

Blyte brickled and shoved Swenton with think-static. Swenton recoiled from the Think and swung his billy. A spastic jolt raced along Blyte’s spine and ended in his fingertips and toes with dead-limb tingles.

Swenton looked conflicted whether to drop his billy or hold it tighter. “I know who your father is,” he said.

Blyte bristled with static. Swenton struck with his billy, then stood pale and breathing hard like he had been laced.

“You took your friend’s lace for him,” Swenton said, speaking fast, like he was thinking it through by saying it. “If you’ve learned your lesson, I don’t need to report this. You have learned your lesson, right?”

Blyte nodded.

“Smart kid,” Swenton said. “Now move along.”

Garen shifts his concentration, exits head-tohead, and breaches out of the Think.

Blyte works his jaw like his ears need to pop. “You always shove everything around when you’re in there. It makes me dizzy.”

“I had to be sure,” Garen says. “You may see things, but you don’t always see everything there is to be seen in them.”

“I told you, didn’t I?” Blyte asks.

“You did good.”

Blyte smiles, and Garen can tell Blyte is about to cry. He knuckles Blyte on the shoulder, like a big brother should.

Long rows of sensory deprivation tanks fill the workroom, each tank shaped like a deep, enclosed sleeping berth. The workroom is the only place where Garen notices the curvature of the floor as it recedes toward a horizon.

Before Garen parts with Blyte for his dep tank, he whispers into Blyte’s ear, “Don’t let anyone see the bruises.”

Blyte’s expression says he’s disappointed Garen could think so low of him; he’s good at pretending nothing is wrong.

At his dep tank, Garen undresses and hangs his clothes on the hooks beside his towel. With a breath of scentless air, the tank’s door slides open. Garen hardly feels the tank’s warm water as he ducks inside and lies flat, faceup. He floats. When the door shuts and he is cradled in darkness, his father enters the Think, head-tohead with everyone in the dep tanks.

They are doing important work, Garen and his father and the others in the workroom. It’s how Garen’s father begins every session—gentle and rewarding and imposing. Each and every dep tank is integral to finding a home world for the ship’s inhabitants. They must remain steady and work together, as each preceding shell-ship did for them, as they will do for each shell-ship to follow, and so on. With their vigilance, they are proving that the trust placed in them by everyone who preceded them into the intergalactic void was well-deserved. Those inhabiting the shell-ships nested within their hull never knew when the world they left behind would make the next technological breakthrough, build a shell-ship that could catch up, and take from them the long-tired reins of exploration. No one knows when the next shell-ship will come and replace them as the outer shell. In time, the outer shell may change, but one thing does not. Together, we make it, or not at all.

Garen’s father targets him with head-to-head:

YOU WILL CONDUCT THIS SOMEDAY AS I CONDUCT IT NOW.

It’s a wink and a hug and a handshake that tightens until painful.

To Garen’s surprise, layers of privacy envelop their head-to-head, dampening the illuminating presence of others in the Think until theirs is the only point in its darkness.

Garen’s father: I HAVE BEEN UNFAIR WITH YOU BY PUTTING YOU IN YOUR POSITION.

Garen: I CAN HANDLE IT. I LIKE EARNING MY POSITION.

Garen’s father: YOU SHOULD KNOW WHAT YOU’LL INHERIT. YOU SHOULDN’T LEARN

OF IT ONLY ONCE YOU TAKE CONTROL OF IT, LIKE I DID.

Garen feels alone in the Think point, trapped.

Garen’s father: I FEAR WE ARE IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL. WE DO KNOW WHEN THE

NEXT SHELL-SHIP SHOULD COME, AND ITS TIME HAS PASSED.

Garen: NO ONE KNOWS WHEN THE NEXT SHELL WILL ARRIVE.

Garen’s father: IT IS IMPORTANT EVERYONE BELIEVES THAT. NOW, MORE THAN EVER.

EACH OUTER SHELL HAS TRAVERSED THE DISTANCE CROSSED BY THOSE THAT WENT

BEFORE THEM IN LESS AND LESS TIME. THAT HAS HELD TRUE FOR EVERY SHELL

ENCLOSED WITHIN OUR HULL. BUT NOW WE HAVE BEEN TRAVELING LONGER THAN

THE SHELL THAT DIRECTLY PRECEDED US INTO THE VOID. WE CANNOT RELY ON THE

WORLD OUR ANCESTOR’S LEFTTOPRODUCE A SHELL-SHIP FASTER THAN OUR OWN.

WE MAY BE THE LAST. WE MUST CARRY EVERYONE HOME.

With an abrupt disconnect, his father ends head-to-head, his message clear—silence is their duty; no more will be spoken of it.

Star charts pour into the Think, dep work already underway. A gold chevron hangs between two monochromatic star fields, marking YOU ARE HERE. The tableau wheels like an infant’s mobile.

Dizzy at the sight of the familiar scene, Garen stabilizes it. Without magnification, each star field is a shrill wall of static, ultrafine detail honed and rendered by others throughout the workroom. Garen magnifies, magnifies, magnifies. The gold chevron is moving away from one star field as broad as all outside. It’s nearing another star field just as broad, longer now to go back and see what happened to the plan enacted to cross the void by their ancestor’s ancestors than to continue ahead and bear it out.

Garen magnifies, magnifies, magnifies. Points ahead emerge from the celestial soup, glowing various strengths of green—possible new home worlds. His father nudges him across the Think. Dazed, Garen goes through the motions and think-feels a bold green point for irregularities. It feels smooth.

He scours its surface—smooth. His heart races; he’s fulfilling a promise made for him and making their remaining journey a straight line instead of a zigzag toward one mistaken possible home world after another. He orders a fine-haired feeler brush from the Think, magnifies the green point, and sweeps its surface.

Smooth.

Tiny exhalations exit his mouth in time with his pulse.

It’s not his place to get excited, to feel his body, to ruin collective Think work with personal sensations.

He passes his green dot to Blyte in a nearby dep tank, glad the protocol of command can conceal his terror and elation: GREEN, INSPECT, CONFIRM.

Blyte passes it back: NON-GREEN, IRREGULAR, LESSON LEARNED.

Garen holds it in the Think, sweeps its surface—smooth.

To Blyte: INTERROGATIVE, IRREGULAR.

Blyte: CONFIRMED.

Garen sweeps the point, his hands itching to pass it from palm to palm. His mouth salivates to roll it from cheek to cheek with his tongue, to taste it. It’s smooth.

Small ripples radiate from him and rebound off the dep tank walls. He senses his enclosure’s dimensions, his body in space. His racing heart rate slows as resignation spreads through him with chilling clarity; even in a dep tank, he can’t get past his body. They are in it for the long haul.

He passes the point to his father: NON-GREEN, IRREGULAR.

His father: CONFIRM.

Garen: CONFIRMED.

His father: CONFIRMED, NICE CATCH.

Garen wonders at his father’s stability. It’s as though they never had their conversation, as though they had it a million times.

The green point blinks and glows red, a nogo.

The gold chevron alters course, its path now set for a star clot illuminated by points that glow faint green.

Garen zooms out, out, out. Out, out, out. In space between the two star fields, the gold chevron travels alone.

Garen shovels substrate into a pressure bin for heat sterilization.

Moving with fluidity and ease, Garen’s muscles warm and ache as he works in the cramped, hot fungi room. Humidity from steaming compost permeates the air. Dim red ceiling panels illuminate roiling steam motes agitated by his movements. He hastens his pace to keep from thinking the work will never end, exhaustion its own reward.

The corridor door sighs open, pouring in harsh white light.

“In or out!” Garen shouts.

The door sighs shut. Before Garen’s eyes readjust, Blyte is speaking. “Get cleaned up, and let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t,” Garen says. “I have another couple bins to sterilize, then I need to mix the medium in the grow trays and cover them with substrate for inoculation.”

Blyte slides a grow tray from its humidity slot in the wall. Small white shrooms bud from a flaky carpet of substrate like bent pins, too young to harvest. He pushes the tray back into the wall, then grabs a handful of substrate chips from the mound and tosses them at Garen one after another.

Garen swats the chips with his shovel, knocking them into the pressure bin.

“I don’t understand why you volunteered for this,” Blyte says.

“Shrooms have been passed down generations,” Garen says, harsher than he intends, then softens his tone. “It’s honorable work.”

“You already do enough in the dep room,” Blyte says.

“Forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”

“Dad doesn’t say so, but he thinks so. I see it when we head-to-head.”

“You shouldn’t pick Dad’s brain,” Garen says.

“It was right there on the surface.”

Blyte throws his last chip at Garen’s head.

Garen deflects it into the bin. “Do you pick my brain when we head-to-head?”

“No. You’d beat the tar out of me,” Blyte says. “Dad doesn’t mind though. It’s like he wants me to see.”

Garen digs his shovel into the substrate mound.

Blyte huffs. “You’re sucking up to score points you don’t need. Dad can assign someone else to take over.”

“I don’t want him to. This is important. You don’t understand.”

“I’m all alone,” Blyte says. “You do this, and I don’t get picked for sport. The only reason I ever got picked was because you told them to pick me.”

“The Think isn’t enough for you?” Garen asks.

“Work?” Blyte asks. “If that’s all I have to look forward to, I should just kill myself.”

“Don’t say that,” Garen says. The truth of their situation gathers as a stone in his throat. He swallows it to keep from coughing it up—the distant hope of reaching a home world in their lifetimes is no more; theirs is a generation fated for obsolescence, a generation to maintain, steadfast, for those they’ll birth as they crawl across the void. He wonders how long it has been their lot. He wonders if anything has really changed for him. “I know you’re not serious, but if you even try something like that, they’ll cut out your we-think imp. They can’t have murder in the Think.”

“Let’s go to the hatch.”

“I’m busy, Blyte. Go play alone. You always end up crying when we play together, anyway.”

“No, I don’t.”

Garen flings a clump of substrate into the pressure bin with a squelching thud and fixes Blyte with his serious big-brother-to-little-brother look.

Blyte’s shoulders sag. “Have it your way.” He opens the door. “You always do.”

“Wait,” Garen says, weighing what things should change now that he knows what he knows, and what things shouldn’t. “Okay,” he says, “lead the way.”

Blyte stands with his back to the hatch, which connects the outer shell to the one nested just inside. He closes his eyes, lips set in a thin, bloodless line.

Garen makes noises with his mouth like someone from inside is working the lock wheel. He scrapes his ring along the gangway’s rail, imitating a knife on sharpening steel. He lowers his voice like a grown man’s and growls.

The lock wheel squeaks. The hatch groans.

“You’ve already done that,” Blyte says. Garen’s body knots ups, on fire to fight, to run. Inside people are supposed to stay inside. It’s a game he and Blyte play. Where is the guard? His throat kinks.

He reaches into the Think, where he bounces his sphere off Blyte’s and tap-taps to warn him.

Blyte brickles. Garen scratches at the brickle then recoils out of the Think from a spray of needling static.

The hatch opens. Someone from inside grabs Blyte’s ankle. A hand, a man.

“You aren’t allowed to touch me,” Blyte says. “Those are the rules.”

The man who has hold of Blyte’s ankle wears outer shell clothing, but he’d never pass for someone from the outer shell. He’s bigger than men Garen knows. His eyes are sharp and blue. A thick, dark beard covers his square chin. It’s the face of a man who eats meat. He glares at Garen, his thinking clear—no witnesses.

“Blyte,” Garen says, “fight back.”

Blyte opens his eyes and screams. The man knocks Blyte down and lunges past him for Garen. In the distance, drumming footfalls echo down the corridor, all hands to attention since screaming distress could signal catastrophe. They’re in the outer shell, after all; outside, vacuum waits for a chink in the hull. The man pulls up short, grabs Blyte, and retreats into the hatch with Blyte slung over
his shoulder. The hatch hangs open, a hole where there shouldn’t be a hole.

The absent guard arrives ahead of the all hands rush—Swenton. Garen’s hands shake.

Swenton’s doughy fist of a face clenches and unclenches with indecision.

Garen strikes Swenton in the nose with a smooth, powerful jab. “Why didn’t you do your job?!”

Blood pours down Swenton’s chin while he covers his nose. Garen connects an overhand right that knocks Swenton off his feet. The impact shivers down Garen’s forearm with frightful exhilaration.

“Why didn’t you make a report?!” Garen shouts. He kicks Swenton in the back. “Why didn’t you stay at your post?!” Garen grabs the gangway’s rail and leverages kicks into Swenton’s ribs and stomach and face. Swenton pisses himself.

Garen enters the Think and pries at Swenton’s sphere for head-to-head. Swenton brickles. Garen breaches from the Think, kicks Swenton, then he plunges back in, where he shoves through Swenton’s wavering sphere, and roughs through his memories.

It’s muddy inside Swenton’s head, concussed and dream-like.

Swenton ran toward Blyte’s scream. Guilt. He hadn’t needed to piss. He had stepped away when he was supposed to step away. His rhythmic knock on the hatch when he left his post was a signal—
him leaving, kids coming. That’s what she said to do. She’s from inside. Full, oldform figure—
woman. On her, beautiful. A kiss.

“There won’t be divisions when we land.” Hardening of his sex. “They can’t keep us apart.” Wet, warm. “They took away everything when they arrived, our purpose, our labor. They pilot the ship.

We’re cargo. We only have each other.” A shivering release. Again. Please. He was returning to the hatch. Guilt.

When the corridor echoes with boots nearby, Garen breaches from the Think.

He sees it coming. Guards will take him for interrogation and see his family ring—he is his father’s son. They’ll debate what to do while the inside man goes further inside with Blyte.

Garen takes Swenton’s billy, clubs him with it twice, then climbs inside through the hatch.

He runs to keep from shaking.

Blyte’s screams rise and fall as the man’s shoulder jams into his stomach with each stride.

Garen focuses on the sound, charging down corridor after corridor. He is a monster in pursuit, worse than vacuum. He grips his billy as though it’s the man’s throat.

One shell-ship in, the corridors are narrower than those with which he’s familiar. The lighting glows tired and yellow. Old floors bow where ages of traffic fatigued the steel, and closed domestic hatches line the walls. Inside people hold eyes to viewports, hiding away yet curious.

Blyte’s screaming ends.

Garen rounds a corner to a sealed hatch, a dead end.

Behind him, a hatch slams shut. Its lock wheel spins to and seals off the corridor section.

A man’s voice crackles from the hatch-tohatch speakers in the ceiling. “Drop the billy, boy, or we blow the pressure.”

Garen charges to the closed hatch before him and wrenches at its lock wheel. Someone on the other side fights him.

“Blow it,” the man says.

Terrible hissing blasts through the corridor, emergency fire protocol hotwired somehow. Garen’s ears pop, his hearing deadens.

Decompression; he has maybe fifteen seconds.

He exhales as hard as he can while fog wraiths through the rapidly cooling corridor.

He jams his billy into the lock wheel and levers at it, making headway against the person on the other side when a brittle spoke breaks under his strain. The billy slips his grip, its clatter muted. The fog thins. He drops to his knees.

His entire body feels like it’s expanding. He can’t empty his lungs any more—empty is empty— yet it’s as though he has taken too many breaths, is about to burst. His intestines inflate with the worst pain he has ever felt. His eyes sting. He grabs the billy and strikes the lock wheel, hoping its charge conducts through from wheel to wheel.

His vision tunnels to black.

He gropes into the Think for Blyte’s illumination. Somewhere. There, dim, bright, brighter. Blyte.

I’m sorry.

Kid’s gone catatonic.

A woman’s voice rides into Garen’s head. Pain throbs across his temples and inside his eyes, yet the woman’s voice rings clear, essence without vocalization or ear. She isn’t speaking to him, rather addressing someone else.

A snap of fingers before Garen’s face. A pinch on his arm. All inside Garen’s head, no fingers, no arm, just in his head.

Garen lies alone in a dark room, facedown against steel gritty with rust, wrists bound behind his back. Experimentally, he mashes his numb fingers together while Blyte, somewhere nearby, streams into him across the Think.

The woman: it’s some kind of shutdown headcases have so one person’s fear can’t flood the Think.

It’s the woman from Swenton’s head. She doesn’t understand. Blyte is streaming what he feels and hears across the Think. He’s not catatonic. Looks the same, if you’re not in on wethink.

A puff of breath to his eyes. Garen blinks, though Blyte did not.

The woman: the way Swenton tells it, “wethink” is short-range. Even if the kid’s aware, he can’t beacon outsiders to him. Too far.

Can we trust Swenton?

A man, now, with the woman and Blyte. The two of them are in a domestic with Blyte, no others.

From the man’s voice, Garen can all but see his face—dark beard, piercing blue eyes. It’s the large man’s voice.

The woman: we have what we need from Swenton. Outsiders are already negotiating for the kids.

The man: and the older kid?

The woman: re-pressurization was quick. He’ll have a banger of a headache, I suppose. A shrug in her voice. He might be as pale as a shroom, but he’s tough for a headcase.

The man: headache serves him right. I was grabbing the lock wheel when he charged it. A grumble of pain and popping knuckles. As much as I’d like to crack his skull, we have to be careful with him. He’s the oldest son of an important line; you saw his ring. If outsiders suspect they won’t get him back, they might send troops with more than billys.

The woman: if that happens, we’ll retreat inside one shell and recruit Paladin’s people with a show of how close we got. Show ’em the kids.

A poke to Garen’s arm, alone in a dark room.

The man: I’m not retreating inside when we’re this close to the outer shell. They can’t shut us
away and wait for our systems to degrade so we die off. We have a say. Our say matters now. We don’t retreat. We land.

Someone works a ring off Garen’s finger. Garen feels it, but his fingers are numb. Plus, wrong finger. Blyte’s ring.

The woman: we give the headcases this kid’s ring. It’s the same crest the older kid has. We tell them to be cooperative. If they balk, we give them his finger, then work up the arm from there. We save the older one for leverage. He’s the important one.

Blyte goes catatonic.

Garen grasps at the trailing wisps of Blyte’s think-stream. It fades and dissipates as though it only ever existed in the Think as a ghostly manifestation.

Garen sits up in the dark and strains wrist against wrist against bond until he feels something, pain, then concentrates on it to pull free.

He holds his hands before him, unbound, slick with blood. Queasiness churns in his gut.

Lightheaded, he stands and stumbles. His right hand feels heavy, thick, thicker. When feeling returns to his digits, he wishes it hadn’t.

With his good hand, he reaches into the darkness and finds a wall, then a hatch. He works its lock wheel until someone on the other side works against him.

“I’ll pay you,” Garen yells at the door. “I’ll give you anything you want. I have gold. My ring. I’ll talk to the outer shell for you. Don’t hurt Blyte. He’s just a kid.”

Garen is raving when the door opens and a dull sliver of light spills into the room.

Before he knows it, he has kicked the door and is outside in the corridor pinning a man almost twice his size to the floor. His hands vise around the man’s throat. Something in his broken hand pops.

A hand rakes at his face, jams at his throat. Fingers go for his eyes and he bites one until it feels like his teeth will break. The finger comes off in his mouth. Blood tastes like blood, old-form or not. The man goes limp. Garen spits out the finger. He doesn’t know how long it took, lost in his adrenaline, which leaves him indecisive. Pain reaches him and tells him to let go.

The man is a redhead, clean shaven, freckled, not Blyte’s abductor.

Garen shakily stands, then kneels beside the man and listens to his chest—silence.

The corridor is empty.

Sobs bubble up in Garen’s throat as he slaps the man and compresses his chest to restart his heart.

This man had fought him, then he opened the door. He had listened.

He slaps the man and blows hard breaths into his mouth—unresponsive.

Garen trembles; he has murdered.

He drags the man through the open domestic hatch, closes the man inside, and runs to keep from vomiting.

It wasn’t him. It was barely him. He had to. He did it for Blyte.

Blyte can’t be far.

He and Blyte are playing Hot And Cold, though Blyte doesn’t know it. Garen reaches into the Think, his focus divided as he navigates the corridor junctures—his think-sphere rolls across a dark, barren plane far from other imps. Cold. Blyte has to be in the Think. Even dark, Blyte’s sphere would be identifiable by its weight on the plane, a trick Garen has never shared with him. Blyte is bigger in the Think than he knows. Garen jogs down an adjoining corridor, and feels a decline in the Think’s plane. Warmer. Where is everyone? At the hatch to the outer shell? All hands preparing for a fight?

Making a show of solidarity so they won’t have to fight? The decline in the Think continues. Warmer.

Garen bumps against a nullity, then pats it for shape—so large it can only be Blyte.

He breaches from the Think.

He faces a closed domestic. Two men talk inside. It’s not a game anymore. He tells himself the first time was self-defense. It wasn’t murder. His body took over. He didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know what was inside him.

He clenches his broken hand into a fist and sets his jaw against the pain. They are inside people.

Blyte is not. His heart races, pulse throbbing in his broken hand. He is tooth and nail. Fist and heel.

Elbow and knee. He is pumping blood.

His hand is on the lock wheel. He is opening it. He is inside.

When it’s over, Garen unties Blyte with trembling hands.

Later, when Garen is older and he speaks about death, his gaze will grow distant. He’ll look up at the stars, and he will say he never really knew how to make a fist, he just did it, and since he has, he wishes he hadn’t. Yes, he could’ve saved his ruined hand, but he didn’t want it anymore; it had betrayed him.

Two men sprawl on the floor of the domestic, dead, neither of them Blyte’s abductor.

Garen kneels and caresses Blyte’s face, voice trembling. “It’s me, Blyte.”

Blyte’s eyes shine, glassy, unseeing.

Garen reaches into the Think and tap-taps Blyte’s dark, smooth sphere.

A bright bead condenses on Blyte’s sphere, a leak, then suddenly a brilliant roaring torrent bursts free. Garen can only flail to fight the rushing wash of it as it inundates him.

Blyte went into his abductor’s head, somehow dredged the man’s old-form brain. He went deep to do it, reptilian. He plucked the man’s dendrites so they sang with memories. Garen is awash in the song, harmonized with it as though he’s wearing the man’s skin and reliving his past.

The man, Dade, comes from inside the inside, born in the fifth shell-ship. The fifth shell was hollowed out long ago for recyclables. Like each of the preceding shells down to the first ship, the tech it once housed was outmoded, useful only inasmuch as its substances could be repurposed.

Dade is a scrap man. He disassembled and melted down starship engines that at the time of their launch were the apex of ingenuity and efficiency, humankind’s greatest hope—a RS-25 liquid hydrogen propellant engine, a Bussard ramjet, a magnetic monopole spicule array, a black hole bender. One engine’s parts were shaped into the spanners and drills and blowtorches used to disassemble the next engine, while the remainder was hammered into things of daily use, cups and grow beds and cookery, until they, too, wore out and were melted down and reshaped into smaller cups, smaller grow beds, and smaller cookery.

Dade met the woman in the eighth shell. Her name is Adalia. Adalia comes from the seventh shell.

She is a mystic, a teacher, a historian. She told Dade everything she knew that was certain and real and true.

There was once a place without walls, which billions of people called home. It was a planet, a ball of rock and water orbiting a sun, which itself was a churning ball of reactive material. On this planet, there was a thing called night, which was very much like a power outage, but without the fear that the cold and the darkness might never end. There was also a thing called day, which banished the night, and it returned with a round regularity that comforted the heart and assured you that you and your home and your sun were in just the right places, everything as it should be. Home was all one shell, all outside, until a vast belt of solar panels was built in orbit around the planet’s equator to capture and redirect the sun’s energy. Following construction of this partial shell, there was a great flourishing. Generations multiplied and multiplied, each toiling for personal satisfaction. Eventually,
rising demand from the growing population reached the fall in the sun’s output. The sun was old. It was dying. That’s when the first ship was launched to leave the galactic arm and look for another home in a younger galaxy across the void.

The first ship traveled many generations into the intergalactic void before a faster shell-ship caught up, encapsulated it, and hastened them along. Together, they traveled many more generations before the next outer shell arrived. So it went, each new outer shell piloting the drive across the void for a shorter duration than the shells inside, until now.

Together, they have crossed the void into a young galaxy. They found a new home. But they’re not landing to claim it. The outer shell is waiting for the inner shells to exhaust their resources and die off. The outer shell wants to inherit the new home alone and look up at the stars with the past purged.

Dade has never seen stars. Something deep inside him aches to see them again, for the first time.

Garen’s shuddering fades as Blyte’s deluge abates. Blyte sits across the domestic, knees hugged to his chest.

“They’re going to cut me up,” Blyte says.

“I won’t let that happen,” Garen says.

“Dad wanted me to see what I have to live up to when I picked his brain. But I’ll never live up to it. I can’t go back. I have nowhere to go.”

“Not true,” Garen says. “The outer shell needs you. We all need you. You, of all people, will find a home for us, not me.”

“They want you. They all only want you.” Blyte’s gaze skates away into the middle-distance.

“Blyte?” Garen asks.

Blyte fixes Garen with his gaze. It shocks Garen as though for the first time Blyte is seeing him for what he is, the gore spattered down his chin, his swollen face, the bodies sprawled beside him—a killer.

“I have to give them what they want,” Blyte says.

A spray of static needles Garen’s head. He doubles over and presses his palms to his temples while Blyte bolts from the room. It’s all Garen can do until he falls unconscious.

Someone stands over Garen. Dade. Garen doesn’t know when he entered the domestic. Adalia enters behind Dade.

Dade raises the billy he took from Garen. “You’re going to wish you got away when you could.”

Garen guards his head with his hands.

Garen tells them everything.

They haven’t crossed the intergalactic expanse. They have it all wrong. They’re only now nearing the young galaxy. They’re not exceeding the speed of light, let alone approaching it. They don’t know how. Space is big. It could be generations more before they reach their new home planet, and that’s only if they find one and start heading there now. The outer shell is the last shell. They have been waiting for a faster shell to overtake them, and it hasn’t come. It won’t. The outer shell will have to bear them home. He can’t say how long it’ll be before then. That’s not his job. He searches for possible home planets and verifies their potential at a distance. And he’s no good at it.

He blubbers, short of breath, fingers laced like a helmet over his head.

Dade shakes his head. “You’re lying.”

Garen balls up, fetal, and shouts. It’s Blyte they want. They need Blyte. Not him. He’s a grunt. All he knows are tricks. Others do the real Think work. He relies on Blyte to make him look like he’s doing his share. He should be shoveling shit for shrooms. They’ll need shrooms for the times to come.

He’s good for nothing else. He killed. He didn’t know it was in him, but it was, it is. And where has it gotten him? The outer shell won’t let him back into the Think. They’ll cut out his imp when he goes back, no exceptions. He has nothing to contribute beyond muscle. He should’ve confessed ineptitude sooner. He’s sorry. He’s sorry. He’s sorry.

Adalia turns her back, whispers something to Dade.

“You won’t save yourself this way,” Dade says.

Garen tells them everything he knows about them. Dade, from the fifth shell. Adalia, from the seventh. Dade an agent of obsolescence. Adalia, preservation. The way Dade feels about Adalia. She deserves a home, freedom, love. She deserves the stars.

“How did you pick my brain?” Dade asks. “I don’t have an imp.”

“I didn’t,” Garen says. “Blyte did. I don’t know how. Blyte is special. He picked your brain, and he shared it with me. He felt how determined you were to kill him if you thought it could help you, so he fled.”

Adalia whispers something to Dade.

“We’re in orbit around our new home,” Dade says. “You’ve disputed that, not disproved it.”

Garen describes the workroom, the gold chevron traversing a void between two star fields, possible home worlds glowing green in the celestial soup. He can’t show them. They don’t have wethink imps. He couldn’t do it alone, even if they had imps. It’s the work of many. Maybe Blyte could do it. Even if Blyte could show them, would they believe what he displayed? What would it take?

“Where did Blyte go?” Dade asks.

“Where would you go if you wanted to hide?” Garen asks.

“Inside,” Dade says. “Toward the first ship.”

“If you’ve been there,” Garen says, “Blyte knows the way.”

Adalia faces Garen. “You’re trying to get us to retreat from the outer shell.”

“I’ll go with you,” Garen says. He taps his temple. “I can find Blyte in the Think but only at short range. I’ll be at your mercy.”

“You said you have nothing left for you back in the outer shell,” Adalia says. “You’re trying to become a martyr.”

“He’s my little brother,” Garen says. “He’s all I have left.”

“Touching,” Adalia says.

“If our journey can be shortened, Blyte is our best chance of doing it,” Garen says. “He’s our best chance of finding a home. He just doesn’t believe it. He’s always been bigger in the Think, and I pushed him around for it and made him feel small. There’s only one way to show him what he is. You have to bring him back to the outer shell. He has to take my place in the workroom. He deserves it.

Not me.”

Dade crouches before Garen and fixes him with piercing blue eyes. Garen can’t look away; it’s as though he’s looking into his own eyes, carnal and beastly and human.

Dade nods. “If you slow down when I tell you to speed up, even once, I’ll shove this billy down your throat and watch you choke.”

“We’re going inside?” Adalia asks. “The headcases are negotiating. Our teams are blockading the hatch. We’re making progress.”

“Look in his eyes,” Dade says. “He’s one of us.”

Thrust by Dade and Adalia, Garen passes through a hatch and goes inside the inside.

Two shells in from the outer shell, his concentration divided between the Think and his wending
path through narrowing corridors, Garen senses Blyte in the Think. Beyond the light from his own sphere, the Think is a plane of elastic shrouded in darkness, Blyte the heaviest thing on it. Something has awakened in Blyte during his flight toward the first ship. He has grown heavier, denser. The Velcro grain of the Think crackling beneath the roll of Garen’s sphere hardly slows his pace as he rolls toward Blyte.

Adalia snaps fingers before Garen’s face. “Are you listening?”

Garen clenches his eyelids, blinks. His hand throbs like it could explode, purple and swollen. He nods, surprised such pain could fade from recognition.

“Paladin has eyes everywhere,” Dade says. “Sniff out your brother and hope we get our hands on him before Paladin does.”

The smell of engine grease mixes with a furry ecology of cook smoke and grime, which cakes the walls. Pitched hoots and whoops echo down the corridors, bending around junctures. Lighting panels ping and flicker.

“Blyte’s not in this shell,” Garen says.

“I don’t think you understand,” Dade says. “Paladin doesn’t let anyone pass through his shell for free.”

“Blyte has been picking peoples’ brains,” Garen says. “He must’ve picked the right ones.”

Dade and Adalia exchange a long look, Dade shakes his head. Adalia sets her jaw and looks away, a silent decision made.

Dade pushes Garen. “Hurry up.”

The whoops and hoots grow louder as they progress through the corridors toward the hatch leading further in, coded language concealed in them—three outsiders, armed, here they are, here, here. Someone skulks across a distant corridor juncture. A pipe hisses steam. The lights flicker beside them, behind them. Adalia leads the way, Garen between her and Dade. She forces a casual pace that says they can carry themselves, they don’t want trouble.

The lights go out. Dade clenches Garen’s shoulder. His voice breathes low and warm in Garen’s ear. “If you run, no one can help you.”

The decline in the Think steepens, and Garen’s mind rolls away downhill through its darkness. He can’t see how far he has in the Think until he’ll reach Blyte. He has only a sense of gathering speed, his body disconnecting from sensation, from time, from place. Outside the Think, he clamps his good hand over his broken hand. With the clarity from the pain, he skids his sphere to a stop and breaches clear of the Think in time to hear a hard voice carom down the corridor out of the darkness.

“Lost?”

Gruff and male and pleased, the word echoes, calling silence after it.

“Just passing through, Pal,” Adalia calls into the darkness.

A lighting panel flickers on overhead.

“Don’t step out of the light,” Paladin says. “I see you’ve brought friends. You’re not stupid enough to bring a gun, too, are you?”

“No,” Adalia says.

Three corridor segments ahead, another ceiling panel flickers to illumination and silhouettes a single short man, his sour face outlined in shadow.

“Good,” Paladin says, “’cause I am, and I’m going to make this quick.”

Garen can feel his mind slipping in the Think, giving in to the steepening slope. He squeezes his broken hand, grits his teeth, and stays concentrated on the corridor.

“You’re not going to ask me why I’ve come back?” Adalia asks.

Paladin shifts his footing as though fixing the aim of his gun. “The only reason you’d come back through here is because you’re dragging a mess behind you, and you want me to clean it up. I figure I shoot you, the mess stops here.”

There’s a click of a gun’s hammer setting. “You don’t want to ask about the kid?” Adalia asks.

“He’s not mine, is he?” Paladin asks

“No,” Dade says, biting off the word.

“Is he his?” Paladin asks, his voice an envenomed bolt aimed for Dade.

“No,” Garen says.

“Then we have nothing to discuss,” Paladin says.

“I’m from the outer shell,” Garen says while Dade’s fingers dig into his shoulder. “We’re looking for my brother. He got past you. We need him back.”

“The shit you say,” Paladin says.

“He picked your brain,” Garen says. “You must like your new friends an awful lot to lie for them,” Paladin says. “The excitement Adalia causes may seem like a rumpus now, but eventually you’ll see it for what it is—trouble, plain and simple.”

“You’ve been having déjà vu,” Garen says. “You’ve been dizzy. Your ears feel like they need to pop, but you can’t get them to pop. You feel like you’ve been running through corridors all day, places you haven’t been in a long time, retreading pathways toward the first ship. Blyte picked your brain.”

There is a click, a gun’s hammer unsetting. “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” Paladin says.

Garen wrenches at his ring, the pain a burning flare of clarity as he pulls it over a swollen knuckle. Dade blocks Garen’s throw so the ring clatters off the ceiling and rolls to a stop between Paladin and Adalia. Someone dashes across the corridor and snatches it.

“Gold,” calls a young female voice from the adjacent corridor. “Outer shell ring.”

“Outsiders have to be after you,” Paladin says.

“They’re not,” Adalia says. “We have the hatch to the outer shell blockaded. They don’t know we lost the little one inside.”

A young woman approaches Paladin, hands him the ring, then glares spite across the darkness with shadowed eyes.

“We need the little one,” Adalia says. “We all do. We haven’t found a home planet like I thought, but he can find it for us. Prove you’re the man I once loved, Pal. Prove that you still care about more than just your shell. Give us a chance, give us all a chance, and let us pass.”

The young woman’s whisper to Paladin is hard and sharp. “Don’t.”

“If the outer shell comes for you,” Paladin says, “I won’t fight them.”

All the lights flicker and ping to illumination.

A silent mob occupies the corridors where there was darkness.

“Show them through,” Paladin says.

The young woman storms down an adjoining corridor. Paladin studies the gold ring, then follows her.

In the Think, in the distance, Blyte’s sphere glows like a flaring star, splendid and awesome, its radiant corona reaching feathery tendrils across the plane’s adamant darkness. Garen can’t arrest his roll downhill toward it; the slope now so long and so great that his concentration slips away. In his sphere, Garen works only to keep from tumbling end over end. The crackling of the Think passing beneath him intensifies to a rumble, then a roar.

Three shells in, the corridors narrow.

The floor crumbles beneath Garen’s foot. His leg drops into a tangle of flaking wires, his shin fetching against the hole’s rust-brittled edge. Dade and Adalia pull him free and inspect his bloodied wound. Garen watches their ministrations with dreamy detachment, the pain stealing his concentration from the Think. It feels like he is piloting his body remotely, the controls growing unreliable. Dade tears a bandage from his shirt and cinches it around Garen’s shin.

“Can you walk?” Adalia asks.

They raise him to his feet. He tests his weight on it. The pain is a bolt of clarity fastening him in his body, in a corridor, three shells in.

“Yes,” Garen says.

Voices echo through the corridors, an argument unseen, inarticulate.

“Let’s keep moving,” Dade says.

Every other step, Garen is running in the Think, losing his footing inside his sphere. Every interceding step is pain; he is pushed, shoved— keep moving, where is Blyte, here, no, further in, go, go, go.

They pass through another hatch.

The curvature of the floor becomes noticeable over short distances, the narrow path ahead slowly falling away in Mobius regression, around and around the shell. A patchwork of strange hides stretch across holes in the floor and flexes under their weight, deadening the sound of their passage. Fetid curing aromas create pockets of spoiled air. Lighting grows inconsistent. Dade and Adalia produce flashlights, which they switch on and train low.

“Where are all the people?” Garen whispers.

“There aren’t any people here,” Dade says. “This is an old place. Anyone living here left that far behind a long time ago, or they came here because of it.”

In the Think, Blyte’s corona pulses. Its far edge extends outward until its brilliance envelops Garen and floods up the plane’s slope. Garen has a glimpse of what the corona illuminates before he tumbles and his sphere careens toward Blyte’s blinding locus—other spheres rush down the slope, the minds of outsiders who were raiding the inner shells for he and Blyte now caught in Blyte’s pull.

Garen collapses under a wave of dizziness. Somewhere in the corridor, there is a breathy noise of swift bodies converging. The lights have gone out. Rays of illumination slice at the corridor’s darkness. Grunts. Bodies collide. It seems like a dream. The floor flexes under Garen, painfully jouncing him. Footfalls depart. Suddenly, he is alone.

A light shines in his eyes. He squints, glad for the glare’s sting. A face leers behind the light, wan and dull-eyed and hungry. There is the sound of a knife scraping across steel, a throaty growl.

The floor jounces, and the face falls away with a wet, crackling thud.

“Get up,” Dade says, and jams his billy into the thin, fallen man heaped before him. “What’s wrong with you? You’ll get us all killed.”

“He’s stalling,” Adalia says. “Pick him up.”

“Inside,” Garen says. “Further.”

In the Think, Blyte’s light envelops the distance. In all directions, it surges out into the nothing beyond the outer shell, brighter, brighter. As Garen rolls toward Blyte’s glow, its radiance strobes across Garen’s view until he is pinned to his shell’s inner surface and Blyte’s light and what it illuminates blur into a singular brilliance.

Garen screams.

“Shut him up,” Adalia says.

There is a strike to Garen’s jaw. He spits blood and probes loosened teeth with his tongue while

Dade hauls him onto a shoulder. Coughing on his blood, Garen orients himself, the sense slipping from him.

Five shells in.

There is something in the Think beyond the outer shell, its glow like a spark in the brilliance. It’s coming. Blyte’s light has attracted it. No stopping it now. Screaming won’t help.

“He’s not making any sense,” Adalia say.

“There aren’t many places to hide this far in. We can find the kid ourselves. Leave him.”

“No,” Dade says.

Six shells in, the walls shake and groan. The floor bucks, knocking Dade and Adalia and Garen to the floor.

“Did we just hit something?” Adalia asks. “Is this the end?”

Blyte’s light retracts into itself across the Think as Garen is about to collide with its burning core.

The grade of the Think levels off. Garen rolls to a stop before Blyte’s controlled glow.

“No,” Blyte says, and steps into the corridor ahead of them. “I found the outer shell. It has been searching for us. I called it to us.”

On good days, Blyte will visit Garen’s farm and sit with him on his porch and look out across fertile hills swept by gentle breezes. Woody wind chimes will clonk out breezy tunes while Garen and Blyte drink cold glasses of clean water. They will be surrounded by curious children who run and get lost and come back and tweak his nose and poke his sides. Happily, he’ll fish into his pockets and give them sweets. The children will speak to each other without speaking, Blyte will remind them, and they’ll say thank you and leave. Blyte will tell Garen that he did this, all of it. Feeling his age, Garen will scratch his head with his one hand and feel a lump of scar tissue behind his ear from an old surgery where something had been removed. Garen will agree that yes, sure, he did this, Blyte is usually right, and he will stare into the crisp blue sky at the pair of moons rising into the coming night.

He will be overcome with dizziness then, and want to sit and realize he is already sitting. His ears will feel like they need to pop. And something about the sky, about those moons, about the space beyond them and the void in which they are suspended will return to him. It will be claustrophobic, but he won’t let his fear overwhelm him, for he will feel like the gentle hand of reminiscence will guide him true.

He will think of old friends, a man and a woman, who carried him through narrow corridors toward safety when he was hurt. It will seem like a disaster, something he lived through that bound them together. He will pass with these friends through widening corridors, past a short man with a sour face who held a gun in his dead hand, and the young woman with shadowed eyes who wailed by his side saying that it better be worth it, that the dead man held off the outer shell’s raid for as long as he could. A man with a face like a doughy fist will be there, too, apologizing. The hand of reminiscence won’t let him revisit these memories with regret. It will usher him through time to a meeting with emissaries from the new outer shell, where they will show him the world that would be their home and it will feel like he is looking down at himself from far, far above.

Blyte will tell Garen that he didn’t know the shell-ship was there when he called for it. He had never seen it, no one had. It was moving through space in a way they couldn’t have seen. He just had an inkling it was there, which he never would’ve explored had he not sensed Garen pursuing him through the inner shells. He would’ve stayed hidden, and they would have been lost. It was looking for them, the final outer shell, seeking a sign, hoping catastrophe had not befallen them as they zigzagged from possible home world toward possible home world.

Garen will nod and reach for his glass of water with the hand that isn’t there.

“I did this,” Garen will say to Blyte, with a gesture of his phantom hand that takes in all they can see.

On good days, he will believe it.

But mostly, he will watch the children grow and leave and come back and leave again and not come back. He will stare into the night sky and think vaguely that he wishes things were different, though he doesn’t know how. He’ll need his little brother to remind him.

Deep Waters Call Out to What is Deeper Still

Sarah Frost | 3902 words

The swordfish dreamed, and Pascal dreamed with it. Zie was still aware of the jeweled tiara dangling from zir fingers, the sphere of notquite-water, not-quite-air suspended above zir, the carpet that muffled the tech’s footsteps. Pascal’s eyes, still open, looked into the fish’s eye, each of which was as big as zir two fists pressed together. Zir unshackled mind sank into the fish’s world and looked out through those huge blue eyes.

The swordfish lived in a world that granted its every desire: Lanternfish hiding below the thermocline, baitfish rolling in silvery balls at the surface, and itself, the predator, swimming in an endless perfect sea. Seawater rushed over gills, shivery-cold and sweet. Motes of plankton danced in the sunlight. Freed from the tiara, Pascal’s mind inhabited the fish’s body. Zie felt the pulse of the waves and the pull of the tides. Zie knew, as the fish knew, that soon it would be time to dive and hunt the deep-sea fishes by the light of their own flesh.

The swordfish was female. There was a tightness in its flesh, a gut-deep restlessness and heat.

That much showed on the technician’s boards, but not the underlying reason. Zie realized what the problem was. Zie pull zirself free of the fish-mind. “Kimi?” Zie called. The tech, a broad-shouldered old woman, waved to zir from an open access hatch in the floor. She was one of the best in her field, utterly in love with every tick and sigh of the machines that created the swordfish’s virtual sea. Pascal would settle for nothing less for zir magnificent gladiatrix.

“There’s nothing wrong,” zie said, striding over to where the tech sat, hip-deep in readouts and indicators. Zie caught a flash of zirself through the tech’s eyes. Square jaw, red-brown skin only a shade lighter than Kimi’s, tall and aloof as an ancient sage. Zie felt a jolt of the tech’s fear before zie settled zir tiara back onto zir head. Zie couldn’t tell if it helped. Kimi was a professional.

Pascal said, “I’m glad you called me, though. You’re right that she’s been off her feed. But she isn’t sick—she’s getting ready to spawn.”

A smile rushed across the tech’s face, chased by a frown. “What does she need?”

“You have that excellent Sargasso Sea environment?” The tech nodded. “Run that one, just on the edge of what she can perceive. Let’s see what she does. Let her migrate, if that’s what she wants.” Zie paused to think. Bringing in males might not be totally impractical. They would need to build a simulation for the mating race, of course. It had been a coup simply for the aquarium to keep a healthy swordfish; imagine if they could breed her!

When Pascal and the tech were both satisfied with the changes to be made to the swordfish’s habitat, zie regretfully turned away from the most magnificent of fishes. Zie settled zir tiara on zir brow and stepped lightly to the back hallways of the aquarium that held zir own office. If zie was going to find suitors for the grand lady, zie would need to do thorough research.

The rosette of stained-glass solar windows painted zir office with pale rainbows. The light swept slowly across zir desk, but zie hardly noticed. The clock chimed. Zie looked up. The silver naiads around the clock face were about to settle in for a noontime picnic of ambrosia and dragonfruit. All thought of the half-finished draft of a letter to another aquarium fled from zir mind. Zie had ten minutes, and zie did not want to be late.

Zie walked over the elevated skyway to the Guinan Gallery. Zie stepped inside and inhaled deeply, drawing down the savor of flowers and fresh-turned earth. Zie took a moment to admire a
spray of tiny white orchids sheltering inside a greenhouse fit for dolls, then hurried on to the cafe.

Zir black-eyed angel was waiting. Chian smiled, and waved, and made Pascal’s heart pound—as always. Zie settled into the chair across from zir friend. She had outdone herself today. Gold-anodized titanium vines climbed her pure black hair, which she had pulled into a pair of puffballs, one on either side of her head. She wore a pale green tunic and a peach robe whose expansive sleeves had been cut in the shape of half-moons. All of the elegance and gravitas that zie cultivated for zir work dissolved in the warmth of Chian’s smile, leaving nothing but tall, awkward, joyful Pascal.

Zie sat. They keyed their orders into the terminal on the table. Long years of friendship had allowed Pascal plenty of time to practice talking to Chian without making an utter fool of zirself (most of the time). Graceful pillars of iron lacework held up the domed skylight that gave the cafe its special grace. Sycamore and bittersweet grew lofty around the diners, brightening the room further with bone-white bark and sprays of vivid orange berries.

“How is life among the plants?” Pascal asked.

“I saw an orchid on the way in—what a lovely little thing!”

“The white one in the dollhouse conservatory?”

“I thought that’s what it looked like,” Pascal said. “Is it really from a dollhouse? Or is it just supposed to look like it?”

“Oh, no, it’s a bespoke Wardian—the orchid is a high-altitude miniature Dendrobium from Nepal.” Chian laughed. “Its species name is deva—deh-vah—which means divine, but it might as well be diva for all the trouble it gives us. I put it out front because it’s finally blooming, and someone besides the techs ought to be able to enjoy it.”

“How does an orchid give you trouble?”

“Oh, well, most of them don’t—they are remarkably tough little lovelies. The real trick is figuring out what sort of stress each orchid expects from its environment...” Chian expounded, her eyes shining. Pascal settled in to enjoy zir friend’s expertise.

She was interrupted by their food, which arrived with a note from the chef inviting them to try one of the day’s desserts. Pascal bit into a dolma, savoring the play of dill and blackcurrant over the sticky rice.

“I’ve been talking your ear off,” Chian said.

“How are the fish? I heard a rumor that the aquarium has something big planned.” While Pascal chewed, zie considered how much to tell her. “You’re looking smug. I’m going to have to pay your fish a visit, aren’t I?”

“Of course,” Pascal said. “But it’s not exactly a fish this time.”

“It’s not...?” Chian’s face fell. “Not a whale. You wouldn’t.”

“No!” Pascal was taken aback. “That would be immoral. Illegal, too. No, this is something else.

As far as I know, we will be the first—no one has dared to try it before.”

“And of course you can’t tell me.”

Pascal shook zir head, smiling. Zie leaned forward and said, in a melodramatic whisper, “The walls have ears.”

Chian laughed, crinkling up her eyes and throwing her head back to give her laughter full voice.

Zie grinned. Finding new ways to summon that laugh was always a joy. Chian politely changed the subject. As they reached the end of their meal, Chian sighed expansively. “I don’t know about you,”

she said, “but I need to try that lemon tart. Split one with me?”

Pascal walked back to zir aquarium, teeth aching pleasantly from lemon curd and powdered sugar.

In zir office, zie finished zir letter and the rest of the day’s administrative ephemera. Then zie folded the daybed out from its nook under the window, snapped the canopy into position, and did zir best to take a nap. Even if everything went according to plan, it was going to be a long night.

The clock chimed. Naiads hunted fireflies by the light of the moon. It was time.

Fifteen minutes later, zie stood on the aquarium’s loading dock, as scrubbed and sterilized as any human being could ever hope to be. Zie had traded zir robe for a turquoise smock, trousers, mask, and cap. The rest of the team stood around zir, similarly kitted: scientists, technicians, and engineers.

Seawater had not been kind to the truck that arrived bearing their precious cargo. Corrosion pockmarked its backswept chrome runners. Its bulbous load glistened, a pure white pearl the size of a railroad car. Zir heart ached. It was too small! As the techs moved in with lifts and sprayers, zie silently promised an infinity of black water to the beating heart waiting inside the machine.

Zie lent a hand to the techs setting up the portable VR rig. Other techs readied the lifesupport, a bubble of thick, watery air held at abyssal pressure. Fog wicked around it. Pascal’s breath steamed.

Zie made a quick mental note of things to check later: humidity, mirroring effects inside the lifesupport field, comfort of visitors, potential damage to equipment. No time for it now; an engineer was signaling to zir.

Zie slipped zir thumbs under zir tiara and lifted it from zir head. Contacts locked open, the anti-proprioceptive field released, and the boundaries of zir sense-of-self expanded until every body in the room felt like an extension of zir own. Zir heart fluttered in response to the collective adrenaline of all the people around zir. Zie slid smoothly through dozens of human eyes, seeking one singular mind.

The engineers cracked the huge pearl open. “Come, my darling,” Pascal whispered. Zie closed zir eyes. Zie tasted stale water and the ammoniac burn of death. “Come, my sweetheart.”

A tentacle as thick as a human leg quested out through the crack in the transport shell. “Colder,”

Pascal said to the technicians. The water inside the transport tank was stifling, but the outside was terribly bright. “Kill the lights!” The temperature in the room plunged further. Another tentacle joined the first.

If Xiphias gladius had been a coup, then Architeuthis dux would be a revolution.

If it survived. The beast was terrified, a sensation it barely understood. It imagined the bowshock of a great whale diving, the roar of death falling out of an unfathomable sky. It grabbed the edge of the shell with its arms. They burned.

Zie was there, in the beast’s mind, awash in its fear and its pain. Zie should have reached out to soothe it, to smooth its transition from the hellish transport shell to the vast virtual ocean that the engineers had diligently created for it.

Instead, Pascal was adrift. Zir skin saw. Zir stomach thought. Zie could find neither up nor down in the lash of the colossal squid’s mind. There was no sun, no center, no gravity. Zie teetered on the edge of panic. Zie might have cried out, but zie had no voice.

In the wash of alien sensation, zie grabbed on to the only thing zie recognized: the grumbling roar of the whale. Physeter catodon, zie named it, reflexively. Whales come from above. Pain and death in the dark! There are no whales here, Pascal told the giant squid. No whales ever again. Its guts demanded, flee! Flee!

Come, zie told it. Out into the cold dark. Come and be safe.

Still half-blind, Pascal groped for the nearest human body. Zie grabbed an arm, a shoulder, and crashed through their owner’s mind like a meteor, wrenching the unfortunate tech’s attention to zir.

“Tell them to cut the truck’s engine. It’s driving the poor thing mad!”

The tech ran. Pascal poured zirself back into the squid’s mind. Zie felt the engine die. The world hung, for a moment, in perfect balance.

Come, zie said.

The squid’s mantle flared. It jetted out of the transport shell, but the techs were ready for it. The habitat systems caught it, letting the frightened creature swim while keeping it within the life-support field. Icy water soothed zir gills and the pain in zir arms. The squid stopped, letting its tentacles flare, and hung in the soothing dark of its private abyssal sea.

Function checks took up the rest of the night. Too tired to go home, Pascal reeled back to zir office. All of the naiads were asleep but one. Resting her aulos on her silver knee, she waited to join the dawn chorus.

A knock came at Pascal’s door. “Come in,” zie shouted, voice cracking. Zie pulled another sheet of numbers onto zir screen and compared it to the sets already there. There were no discrepancies!

The techs were right. Of course they were right. Then why...?

“Pascal,” Chian said. Zie looked up, and it was like looking into a sunrise. Chian had rolled her hair into locks, and braided them with ribbons of holographic fire. Her double-breasted jacket was slashed to reveal billows of fiery silk. She was a vision.

“What...? Sorry?”

“You missed lunch.”

“Oh.” Pascal rubbed zir eyes. “I thought I sent you a message. Did I forget?”

“No. But that was a week ago.”

“I’m sorry. It’s been a nightmare. Maybe next week?”

“And by missed lunch,” Chian continued, “I mean that you haven’t eaten today.” She pointed at the clock, where naiads frolicked in a stream dappled with afternoon light. Then she offered Pascal her hand. Her fingernails were unfashionably short; her cuticles were torn and chewed. She said, “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

Pascal took her friend’s hand like a castaway clinging to the lifeline of a passing ship.

They ate at the aquarium’s own cafe, inside a table designed to look like a giant conch shell. The place was claustrophobic and its pink light cast unappetizing shadows on the food, but it was superbly private.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” Chian said. Pascal gave up on zir home fries and rested zir elbows on the table, digging zir fingers into zir hair. “Architeuthis,” zie moaned.

“Your giant squid? I saw the news. That’s amazing! I haven’t had a chance to see it yet.”

“I can take you on a tour this afternoon,” zie said. Then, “She’s dying.”

“Oh,” was all Chian could say.

“I don’t know why! Something must be wrong, but I can’t find it. You think I’m bad? I keep sending the techs home; otherwise they would be working themselves to death....”

“But of course you stay. Because she’s your baby,” Chian said.

Pascal smiled ruefully. “I don’t think of it like that, but... I suppose you’re right.”

“What’s wrong with her? I mean,” Chian added quickly, “What are the symptoms?”

“She’s not interested in eating. That’s the one thing that no one can miss. But the real problem goes deeper than that, and I just—can’t—”

“Eat,” Chian said.

Pascal took a bite of potatoes, chewed, and swallowed. “She is a cephalopod. There are five hundred million years of evolutionary distance between us. Their lineage is older than that orchid of
yours.”

“Older than all flowering plants,” Chian agreed.

Pascal picked up another forkful of potatoes. Chew. Swallow. “Why did I think I could understand her mind? Because I can understand fish? Fish are practically my cousins, compared to Architeuthis.

Everything is different, and it makes no sense!”

Fork. Chew. Swallow.

“I’ve been reduced to overanalyzing the biosnow in our seawater. If you catch me counting salt ions, please toss me in the bay.” Pascal sighed. Zie poked zir plate with zir fork, but there were no potatoes left. Chian pushed a plate of fruit across the table.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she said.

“I’m not,” Pascal snapped around a mouthful of orange. Zie swallowed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t complain....”

“No, no. You need to vent. So. How is your swordfish doing?”

“Would you like to come and see?” Pascal asked, with the first hint of a smile.

Pascal led Chian around the barriers and into the swordfish’s closed gallery. Behind the folding screens, half-empty crates disgorged piles of equipment and drifts of transparent packing wool. “It’s not as disorganized as it looks,” Pascal said, for zir own peace of mind. All of Chian’s attention was on the silver-skinned predator who swam serenely above them.

“What is all this? What are you planning...?” Her voice was hushed, as though she had entered a temple.

“She is ready to spawn. I am arranging for some males to be brought in—three, I think. Only the best.” Pascal walked around the room, gesturing at places in the air above piles of equipment. “I plan to introduce them to her slowly. First, they will be in separate enclosures. My techs assure me that they can allow her to see and smell them as though from a long distance away. What happens after that will depend on her.”

“And then...?”

“My hope... If she approves of them, she will let them engage her in a mating race. Then, if everything goes well, we shall have larval swordfish. Bred in captivity. A first.”

“A mating race...” Chian looked down. “It sounds dangerous. The swords...?”

“The male of the species is much smaller than the female—and Xiphias gladius does not tend to use her sword on her own kind. Prey, yes, and predators.”

“Don’t they attack whales?”

“Only if provoked. Stories about swordfish attacking Mysticeti are entirely fanciful.”

Chian nodded. “Can we see the giant squid now?”

Pascal squared zir shoulders. “All right.”

They threaded their way through the crowd. Most of the people paid no attention to them. A few noticed Pascal. After a lifetime of practice, zie could almost ignore the startled glance, the flinch, the surreptitious pointed finger and whispered word. Zir tiara rode heavily on zir brow.

They came to a room like a cathedral, lit with dim red light. The squid hung in its bubble of deep ocean, its arms outstretched, like an angel of strange flesh. Chian took a step back without thinking.

She cast around for something, anything else, to look at, and found the first sign announcing what was known about the giant squid.

“Architeuthis dux,” she said, pronouncing it like “ducks.” Pascal cleared zir throat. “It’s actually more like ‘dukes.’ That’s why they named her Duchess.”

“They?”

“The techs took a vote.”

“They didn’t ask you?”

Pascal shrugged. “I don’t go to those kinds of parties.”

“That’s too bad.” Chian dragged her eyes back up. The squid’s mantle, as tall as Chian herself, pulsed slowly. The tide of humanity flowed around them.

“Its eyes...” Chian whispered.

“She hunts by sight. Look at one of her eyes, then look off to one side—can you see the glow?”

“My god.”

“There are bands of bioluminescence in her eyes. When she hunts, her eyes swing forward, and those bands are like searchlights, lighting up her prey.”

“What does she hunt?”

“Fish, mostly. Other squid. It’s hard to know exactly. Her brain is actually a ring of nerves around her esophagus. She can’t swallow anything too big without giving herself a stroke. Her tongue is like a rasp. She bites chunks out of her prey and then shreds them with it.” Pascal made zirself stop talking and just watch Chian, whose eyes had lit up in a way that had nothing to do with bioluminescence.

Through the haze of frustration and long, pointless days, Chian’s open-mouthed smile smote Pascal like a fresh spring breeze.

“Is she lonely?” Chian asked.

Pascal looked up at the great squid for one long moment. “I have no idea,” zie said.

That night, Pascal stood in the squid’s gallery, and lifted zir tiara off of zir head. “Tell me what’s wrong,” zie whispered to the dying animal, as zie let zir mind drift up into the dark and silent water.

The world had ended. Ages passed, turned, and flowed back the way they came. Looking out through the squid’s huge eyes, Pascal caught glimmers of glowing fish flickering in the darkness. Zie tried to pull the squid’s attention to the possibility of prey. It did not care. The corpse of the world hung beneath its arms. It stared blindly into the dark, waiting.

What do you want? Zie begged. Zie listened to the syncopation of zir three hearts, tasted the sweet chill of water moving under zir mantle. Zie let zir arms hang loosely in the water. No prey would come. The world was dead. Now there was only the slow pulse of light and dark, only the steady rain of corpses falling from the upper seas. Zie would die soon and be buried in drifts of silence.

The morning crew left Pascal where zie lay. Zir tiara lay on the ground near zir outstretched hand, and none of them wanted to get too close. Broken loose from its moorings, Pascal’s mind tumbled down into an infinite, empty sea. Zie was so very cold.

“What are you doing? Why aren’t you—go get the paramedics, what’s wrong with you? No, I’m talking to you! Do it! Go!”

Warmth, then. A bloodhot tide lifting zir. Zie found zirself looking out through a woman’s eyes.

Don’t die, the mind cried. Don’t, oh, don’t. The sky will freeze. My heart will break. The light will go out. Don’t die, oh, please! Zie saw zirself lying on the ground, a caryatid transformed into terribly fragile human flesh, a pillar of the world that had collapsed with no warning.

Pascal opened zir eyes. Zie looked into Chian’s eyes, seeing zirself seeing herself seeing zirself seeing herself. Zir mind surged with wonder at the beauty of zir friend’s face, the light in her eyes, the soft bow of her mouth, the dreamedof warmth of her strong body. Chian felt zir passion and flinched away. She couldn’t bear it; zie was her guidestar, her sheildmate, her strong and steady rock...! Their
minds pulled apart with a bone-deep snap.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” Pascal slurred. Zir tongue was thick and zir mouth tasted of dried blood. Pascal groped for zir tiara; Chian put it in zir hand.

“It’s all right,” she said. The paramedics arrived with their stretcher and their bottles of saline.

They ran a tube into Pascal’s vein. A miniature ocean, she thought. Each heart beats in a private ocean, but if one of those hearts should stop...

Chian kept pace with the stretcher all the way to the hospital.

“What did you do?” Chian asked. Above them, the giant squid focused on its prey. The lanterns behind its eyes swept forward, illuminating the piece of baitmeat for a moment before its feeding tentacles struck. It dragged its dinner down into the nest of its arms. All around them, schoolchildren squealed with gleeful horror.

“Whalesong.”

“Whalesong?”

“Come and see.”

They slipped behind a screen and into the tech’s booth. Kimi looked up from her controls and smiled. One of her screens showed a spectrogram of the sounds being added to the VR tank.

Pascal said, “It turns out that giant squid can hear whalesong.”

“All Duchess wanted was a little music,” Kimi said.

“Don’t whales eat squid?” Chian asked.

“Sperm whales do,” Pascal said. “And squid can’t hear their hunting calls, not until it’s too late.

That’s what fooled me. When Duchess arrived, she thought she was hearing a sperm whale, and it scared her almost to death. But the baleen whales, the Mysticeti, their voices are deep enough for her to hear... and...”

“She missed her friends,” Chian said.

Kimi busied herself with her readouts while her guests looked at anything but each other. Chian coughed. “So. Lunch?”

Pascal followed zir friend through the halls of zir aquarium and out into the afternoon air. Zie tried not to think of being wholly within Chian’s mind, the heat of her skin, or the beat of her heart.

They took their usual table at the cafe. Pascal looked up at the climbing bittersweet vines, the leaves pressing themselves against the skylight. Across the table, Chian sat with her head bowed, pursuing a deep study of the menu. Opals flashed in her hair like meteors against the night sky. Pascal said something, something stupid. Zie was barely listening to zirself. Chian laughed.

Was there a catch in her voice? A hesitation in her smile? The sky will freeze. My heart will break. A creature of stone lying broken. They ordered, and fell to discussing the impending meeting of the Begonia Fanciers’ Club. Pascal thought of zir Architeuthis dux, zir Duchess, listening to whalesong in her private ocean. She was a revolution.

And nothing would ever be the same.

Silhouettes

Dave Creek | 2657 words

TRANSMISSION 1109 from Leo Bakri, planet Keleni, received 05/29/2151 at Exobiology Center, Newton Habitat University:

SCIENCE REPORT 308

GLIDING INTO PARENTHOOD

PERSONAL NOTE:

Yes, I’m well aware of the disdain the “colorful” portions of my titles, along with my informal style, elicits from some humorless individuals within the scientific community, to which I say: tough luck.

This may be my last major scientific report from the planet Keleni, so I’ll title it as I wish. All right, let’s pretend it has a subtitle: “An Examination of Birth Patterns Among Manta Gliders of the Planet Keleni.” How’s that?

I’m also attaching excerpts from my personal notes to this report, since I’m told that my

“adventures” make good copy in the university’s newsletters. Conflicting messages, anyone?

I suppose the university can’t help it, though, if people are fascinated to learn what kind of trouble an eighty-seven-year-old man who has to use an exoskeleton to get around has gotten himself into now.

Ugh. Even with the exoskeleton I’m pretty tired before I start out. Not having a good day. But I can’t let myself dwell on that. I didn’t bring myself all these light-years from Earth just to sit around.

SCIENCE REPORT (CONT.):

On Day One of my little expedition, I started out in my squat, armored rover, leaving my small home, which huddles close to the ground so as to provide protection from the planet’s eternal windstorms and hurricanes. The trip would only be a quick flight in my shuttle, but the rover contains the better set of research equipment and is slightly more comfortable if I end up spending a few days at the remote site.

ATTACHMENT: Details of Keleni ecology:

Keleni spins three times faster than Earth, with stronger winds, sometimes up to 100 to 200 kph, and with more violent hurricanes and other storms, larger waves, and more lightning. It has more jet streams, more turbulence. Hurricanes can last for weeks or months....

PERSONAL NOTE:

Even encased within the rover, it feels as if Keleni is trying to scour me off its surface. The vehicle
shakes and rocks back and forth, making driving that much more difficult, especially since I’ve already been feeling tired all day.

Living here the past few years, though, has allowed me to view many marvels, such as what I call the Great White Spot, a massive hurricane twelve years old that hovers over this world’s largest ocean, never trying to sneak toward land. But those “normal” 200kph winds over land areas have brought wonder enough, given how they’ve forced animals such as the manta glider to adapt.

SCIENCE REPORT (CONT.):

The rover made its usual slow progress across Keleni’s landscape, which of course has no roads to aid its advance. On Earth, one might follow common pathways of animals through thick vegetation or woodland areas, but this world’s constant tempests erase such paths as quickly as they’re formed.

At one point, as the rover made its way through a shallow valley, the winds whipped up so severely I raised the vehicle’s six wide wheels to let it settle onto the ground. I deployed the support claws to grasp the earth and keep the rover from being blown away and me along with it. I registered peak winds of 350 kph!

After about ten minutes, those winds slacked off just enough for me to retract the claws, lower the wheels, and get the hell out of that valley.

Given its rapid rotation, a day on Keleni is only eight hours long. I’d started my journey at sunrise, but only four hours later I hadn’t yet reached my destination, and with the sun setting, I decided to wait to proceed any farther.

PERSONAL NOTE:

Given my own physical limitations, my preference is to wait out the night, no matter how many lights, night vision devices, and lifeform sensors I may have. I’m at the mercy of my technology and how it interacts with this violent planet, and I prefer not to push its limits, especially on days when I’m feeling tired even before I start a particular project.

SCIENCE REPORT (CONT.):

Eight hours after I began, it was now Day Two of my expedition. Within about an hour and a half, I arrived at the manta gliders’ breeding grounds. I deployed the rover’s claws again, purely as a precaution. I made the usual checks on my exoskeleton and left the rover.

Winds were light for Keleni—about 75 kph. With the sun climbing into the sky so quickly, if you stood in one spot and watched your shadow, you could see it grow shorter and stouter from one moment to the next. The landscape was dominated by plants I’d dubbed sunnysiders, which featured red and blue cylindrical leaves that tracked the sun throughout the short day. Their wide roots anchored them firmly into the soil against even the strongest winds.

Some of the manta gliders concealed themselves among the sunnysiders. Still more gliders hid among another group of animals called daggerheads, which resembled manta gliders from above. The gliders were taking advantage of the fact that daggerheads weren’t tasty to many flying predators, essentially saying, “See, I’m not tasty either!”

My exoskeleton held me unmoving at the side of the rover as I deployed a low-slung equipment
module that lowered itself from the rear of the rover and walked itself to the edge of the manta gliders’ breeding grounds. It opened up, its metal flaps sliding closely along its skin to keep the winds from catching them and blowing the module over.

Various components slid, rolled, or flew from the module. Most would in turn launch nanite probes that would seek out the slumbering manta gliders in their caves or shallow holes, would burrow into the ground, or take flight. They would record cubes and flat images of the gliders and their prey, as well as the creatures who, in turn, preyed upon the gliders.

ATTACHMENT: Details of manta gliders:

The animals use tens of thousands of tiny legs working in concert, almost like flagella on sea creatures. Those legs allow the manta glider to move with incredible grace and agility. Its “wings,”

anywhere from half a meter to two meters wide, can glide over virtually any surface. Sometimes the manta glider literally glides, tilting itself so that flowing air pushes against its underside to lift it and propel it along.

The manta glider feeds mostly on insects, but they’re especially fond of small sedentary animals called nesters. They can sting a nester with a poison that immobilizes it. The manta glider then takes it slowly into its body and digests it over a period of days. This eliminates the need for feeding for some time but also makes the manta glider vulnerable to other predators during that time.

The gestation period of the manta gliders is about two months, and the mother will only feed a couple of times, hiding in a cave or hole the rest of the time to protect themselves from predators such as mud walkers and wind sprinters, which are faster and stronger than they are....

PERSONAL NOTE:

So—have you noticed that undercurrent of dissatisfaction or cynicism in parts of my little report here? Gentle mention of “disdain” or downplaying my “adventures,” and making sure to mention my exoskeleton—something a man in early middle age like myself should never have needed if I’d gone ahead and had rejuv when I was supposed to?

Don’t worry, it’s nothing the university or anyone else has done. If I feel as if I’m a damaged soul, it’s all of my own doing.

Listen to me—“damaged soul,” indeed. What a bunch of pretentious crap. The truth is, I’m not certain whether I want to go on living much longer.

Oh, not for me the lamenting and the ennui and pointing a disruptor at my head. It’s just that it’s taken me this many decades to realize the reason I neglected my own health was because I didn’t feel I was worthy of living longer.

But let’s set the melodrama aside for now, shall we?

SCIENCE REPORT (CONT.):

With the winds fairly calm, at least by Keleni standards, many of the pregnant manta gliders were out in the open. I saw a few who had already enveloped nesters and were heading into the digestive phase. One hapless glider, in turn, was being stalked by a mud walker. Imagine a furry, egg-shaped
being with stubby legs. You couldn’t underestimate its speed, however. Those little legs soon overtook the food-burdened manta glider and pounced upon it. It was a slow-motion pouncing, though, given that the mud walker was about half the size of the manta glider and still had to stay as close to the ground as possible even on what was a calm day by Keleni standards.

Manta gliders breathe through a type of trachea situated on their backs. The mud walker pressed itself against that trachea until the glider suffocated. Then it began to feed on the glider. If enough of the nester the glider had been feeding on was left, it would consume that, as well.

By the time the mud walker had its fill, the sun was starting to set yet again. From my vantage point just outside the rover, I could barely make out its silhouette as it left behind the remains of the manta glider and the nester. Its outline faded away as it entered a stand of sunnysiders that had turned themselves to soak in those last remaining bits of sunlight.

PERSONAL NOTE:

Yeah, sometimes I feel as if I’m the one fading away here on Keleni. My exile has been self-imposed, but some days I feel no less destitute for all that. Some days I feel as if I’m the silhouette, and my real self is the one at the mercy of a source of illumination and being perceived from the proper angle.

Or maybe this is just a lot of bullshit that I’m thinking because I’m so tired. Now I’m getting short of breath. I think I’d fall down if my exoskeleton wasn’t holding me up.

Oh, crap, a medical alert!

MED ALERT, THROUGH DATALINK:

THIS IS A MEDICAL ALERT. ACCESS DIAGNOSTIC BED IMMEDIATELY. IF UNABLE, REQUEST HELP THROUGH DATALINK. EXOSKELETON CAN ALSO TRANSPORT YOU.

PERSONAL NOTE:

Okay, so maybe I have to embrace some of the melodrama after all. I was about to fall over, but at my command, my exoskeleton got me inside the rover and onto this bed. Its medical tech isn’t as advanced as what I have back in my house, but it’ll do for now.

Seems I’m having some kind of “event” relating to cardiomyopathy.

The bed has injected me with some medical nanites that are checking out my heart rate, blood pressure, how well I’m breathing, and my body’s oxygen saturation.

After the fact, I realized I was getting short of breath even as I deployed the equipment module.

Now it’s tough even for me to lie down here on the bed. Turns out that’s a symptom, too.

The solution? Turns out there’s a list. ACE inhibitors. Beta blockers. Heart pacemaker. Heart transplant, or, in my case, an implant, since I don’t think a manta glider or mud walker would be a suitable donor.

But remember the part where I didn’t feel worthy of a long life?

SCIENCE REPORT (CONT.):

Work continued in my absence as the countless nanite probes began to report back. They revealed details of the physiological changes the manta gliders went through during their pregnancies, and how they used various tactics to keep from becoming prey, especially in the latter stages of gestation. And in just a few days or even hours, they should start giving birth, some of them away in their hidey-holes, others right out in the open beneath 100-plus kph winds or higher.

ATTACHMENT: Survival strategies in manta gliders during pregnancy: Given that pregnant manta gliders are generally abandoned by their mates after conception of their child, the females of the species must engage in several strategies to survive....

PERSONAL NOTE:

I really don’t feel like going over any of that data right now. For my own sake, I really should get back to my house, where I have access to more, and better, medical tech. But that would mean abandoning this science mission, and this kind of thing is the whole reason I’m here on Keleni.

That, and the continuing effort to try to forget my past.

Oh, I could have had my memories actually snipped. But I think that’s cheating. Just as, somewhere deep down, I’ve always thought having rejuv treatments are cheating. We live the time we’re meant do.

Said the man hooked up to a diagnostic bed, brought there by an exoskeleton, his bloodstream teeming with medical nanotech.

What was that about a foolish consistency?

Decades ago, working in law enforcement, I took a man convicted of a simple assault charge aboard an orbital habitat down to Earth where he died in a terrorist attack. Blamed myself.

Served on a starcraft during the Great Human War and kept the engineering module’s blast doors open enough during an attack that my lover Marie Sovel could get out. Endangered the ship in the process.

That they made me forget. Marie was the love of my life, and they wiped away all knowledge of her as anything other than a coworker. Punishment for my crime, though I found out later what had happened. Guess that’s why I’m so leery of the snip now.

Then came years, decades, of study, after abandoning law enforcement and military duty and remaking myself as a scientist and explorer. I purposely refrained from intimate human contacts of any sort. No time for tenderness or affection, plenty for applied planetology. Very little for sex, but lots for exobiology.

I’ve heard the idea that to embrace death is to accept it as part of life. But these manta gliders, while not sentient, don’t accept that idea. They abandon the open spaces where they normally live for an underground existence as their children develop within them, coming out only when they can’t deny their hunger any longer, emerging to track down prey at risk of becoming prey themselves.

They work, they fight, to live and to make sure their children live.

So I want to see how these manta gliders manage it, manage to give birth, with so much stacked against them.

But the biotech readings on this bed are telling me I may not last that long. In fact, they also tell me that heading back to my house for treatment may kill me, and even if I get there alive, any treatment
is just prolonging the inevitable. Seems that all these years I’ve gone for the quick patch-up job, and now everything’s coming loose at once.

So here’s the next question—what do I do now? Risk death for a chance to witness this miracle of birth, blah, blah, blah, as it happens? Or head back home to give myself a few more minutes or hours of life attached to more machines, simply pondering the events of my life as I have countless times over?

ATTACHMENT:

Automatic data upload from research nanites due to my own immobility.

Number of manta gliders examined: 136.

Number who survived birth process: 107.

Deaths of manta gliders and offspring due to complications with birth: 4.

Deaths of manta gliders and offspring due to predators: 25.

My observations here confirm many of my theories regarding...

PERSONAL LOG:

The moment I completed the above attachment, I was grateful that I decided to engage in what amounted to a celebration of new life rather than a consideration of the dead past. Considering the very existence of life is as close as I get to some sort of spirituality. I’d try to explain that, but it would probably just meet with more disdain for being too “colorful.”

Tough shit. And don’t bother begging for more.

This may be my last major scientific report from the planet Keleni. If it is, then just remember me as....

TRANSMISSION 1109 from Leo Bakri, planet Keleni, ENDS.

TRANSMISSION 1110 from Bakri home A.I., planet Keleni, 05/29/2151 at Exo biology Center, Newton Habitat Uni versity:

Leo Bakri lifesigns terminated. As per subject Bakri’s request, his exoskele ton transported his remains outside the rover and atomized them. Approxi mate windspeed at moment of atom ization: 215 kph.

TRANSMISSION 1110 from Bakri habi tat A.I., planet Keleni, ENDS.

Adventures in Family Bonding

W. Michael Beachy | 3225 words

I get the call at 9:02 P.M. on a Tuesday in March. I expected it, and yet it surprises me. I say hello, and Ben responds in kind. He sounds a little off, something in the meter of his speech, like some frantic lie thrashes just under the truth of what he’s saying.

“We’re planning a vacation for this summer, to London. Just Anna and me. We were hoping you could look after Gene.” I hear a sharp intake of air on his end, then the slow thunder of what must be a hand covering the receiver; a private conversation. I cough, though nothing tickles my throat.

Something shuffles on Ben’s end.

“Think you could swing that, Mom?”

“Why can’t you take Gene with you? It could be a good experience for you.”

“They’ve got these new travel restrictions in Europe, as of like three weeks ago. Gene can’t fly, and a boat’s out of the question.”

“How long do you plan to stay there?”

Ben hesitates, and I can almost see him do it. That stricken look on his face that told of so many uncovered childhood lies, his eyes staring at some distant nothing, his mouth open just enough to reveal the edges of his teeth. Less than a second’s hesitation, but I can see it.

“It’s not finalized, but we’re thinking ten days,” he says. “Two weeks at most. We’re debating about getting over to the continent for a few days too, maybe visit some of Anna’s family in France while we’re so close.”

“Shame Gene can’t fly,” I say. “Europe might be good for him.”

“Can you watch him, Mom?” Ben asks.

He’s pleading, I think.

“What about Roberta?” I ask.

“She doesn’t get on well with Gene since our last visit.” Gene discomfits everyone, he doesn’t say.

I snort a little, and Ben hears me.

“Mom, please.”

Yes, that’s a plea. For a moment, he’s a boy again, towing a tiny malformed kitten into my kitchen, begging we give it quarter only to let it die of starvation the next week. He’s a boy again, covered in blood from the pig slaughter I forbade him from helping the Amish with until after his twelfth birthday, sobbing big snotty bubbles and screaming to forget. He’s a boy again, and he lies to me about the marijuana I find in his room, desperate to place blame on a friend. He’s a boy again, and I’m always his mother.

I took that pot and smoked it later.

“Please.”

A pause, then—

“He’s your grandson.” His voice goes up at the end, like it’s a question.

“Yes, fine, I’ll do it,” I say, remaining calm and placid as I always have when he gets this way.

Let mommy make it better for you, Ben, you’re in over your head. He didn’t need to reach for the

“grandchild” trump card, I was going to say yes anyway. “Just send me the details when you have them.”

“Mom, thank you so much, I can’t even—”

“It’s fine Ben, it’s fine. How’s work, how’s Anna?”

“Work’s a slog right now, and I’d rather not talk about it. Anna’s good. She’ll be happy to hear that we can go to Europe this summer. Listen Mom, I’d love to talk, but I’ve got a long day tomorrow.

We’re launching a new marketing campaign, and I’ve got meetings and presentations at the Center until the next morning it feels like. Can I let you go?”

“It’s fine Ben, it’s fine. Give my love to Anna.”

“Bye Mom.”

“Goodbye. I love you, Ben.”

“Love you too.”

I put the phone back in its cradle, an antique monster of black plastic with a rotary face, passed down from my mother’s mother to her and from her to me. I’m one of the last landline holdouts in the county and will be until the old thing gives up the ghost. Or I do. But I’ll go first. They don’t make them like this anymore, not even the ones in space will last so long. I will be dead longer than I’ve lived, and still this phone will persist, lodged away in a dank corner of the Institute for the Divestment of Antiques and Contraband, buried at the bottom of a mountain in the blasted out ruins of that place, until time smears everything, and someday it worms it’s way to the surface of a world which has forgotten the phone and all her progeny, found sticking out from a bed of moss by a passerby on her daily constitutional, bringing it to her tribe or clan who puzzle over its lost intention before smashing it to pieces and using its skin as arrowheads and its guts as fishing line.

But now, Gene is coming to stay with me. And it’s fine, it’s fine. I walk from the kitchen and down the hall into my bedroom and look at the photos of my dead husband, of Gene, who died too young, so many years ago, never knowing our son. It’s fine, Gene. It’s fine.

It’s now the twelfth of June, another Tuesday, and well past midnight. Gene has been here for three days without incident. Now he stands in the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms, his face an inch from the wall. I don’t see him, and so I bump into him as I shuffle toward the kitchen, dropping my dry and empty plastic cup.

“Gene,” I say and poke his head with my forefinger. “Gene. What are you doing?”

He continues to stare at the wall, silhouetted by the dim light that drifts down the hall from above the kitchen sink. He doesn’t make a sound.

I poke him again.

His mouth opens, then closes, then opens again.

“I cannot access the Network,” he says. Declaring. Lamenting.

“So you’ve pointed out. Go back to bed.”

“I forget things. I am forgetting things.”

“Anything important?”

Again his mouth opens, closes. His feet shift, then he turns to look at me. Darkness hides his face.

I take a step back.

“I am forgetting things. That should be cause enough for concern, right? Shouldn’t you rectify this?”

“Gene, go to bed. We can talk about this in the morning.”

He continues to face me, without moving.

“Go,” I say and thump his forehead and he goes, full of something like brief purpose.

Gene sits across the kitchen table from me and watches as I eat my oatmeal. Not the packaged stuff, the real, stone-cut kind. I buy it from the Amish who live a few miles west on a tiny plot of land they refuse to sell. They’re nice and polite and a little obnoxious because of it.

Unmoving, he watches me, wearing a face so like the one worn by my Gene in his youth. Curly brown hair kisses his eyebrows and the lobes of his ears, framing a round and boyish face home to few smiles and seeming always on the verge of growing older. He sits upright, on the edge of his chair, a model of perfect posture. “American Made” leaps across the front of his loose-fitting gray T-shirt, wrinkled but stainless. I’m sure Ben thought that was funny.

Gene stares at me like a person who expects something, but his eyes stay silent, vacant even. We sit without speaking as I finish my breakfast.

“Grandma,” says Gene as I get up to wash my bowl and spoon. “You said we would talk in the morning. It’s now morning.”

“Didn’t forget that now, did you?” I don’t really chuckle.

“The Network, Grandma. Can you get access out here? I don’t want to forget everything.”

“Don’t you have some way of getting a satellite feed?” I ask.

“Restrictions have been placed. That’s all I know.”

“Because you’re forgetting.”

“Yes. I am forgetting.”

Hot water chugs its way from the heater in the cellar and through the kitchen faucet. I take a towel and soap to the bowl. After a moment, I rinse it.

“What are you forgetting, exactly? What’s so important that you remember?” I towel the bowl dry, rotating it in my hands as I look at Gene.

“I am forgetting.”

“Well, I’m not going to pay for two weeks of Network access just so you can remember shooter stats or who all played Batman or whatever it is they tell you to like.” I place the bowl in its cabinet and walk toward the door to the family room. “You’re here for another week. We’ll work on making some new things for you to remember; new memories that you can keep without having to get online.”

Gene gets out of his chair and steps away from the kitchen table in one lithe motion. “We will make new memories,” he says. It is not a question. “What do you propose, Grandma?”

Oppressive heat provides an ironic juxtaposition to the free and open green expanse of the soybean fields that surround us. I laugh to myself and almost point this out to Gene before immediately deciding not to. Sweat beads across my brow, drips down the slope of my nose and the nape of my neck, and travels down my back; seeping through my shirt, my waistband, searching out my nethers, until I am soaked, stained, and happy. I reach my hand into the ground, the hot, dry surface giving way to cool moisture—dark and rich—and I feel a worm dart from my touch and down the relative deepness of its hole. I dig a small pit, scooping the dirt with my cupped hands and placing it just beside. Sweat drips off the tip of my nose into the soil and disappears. I smile and more of it stings my eyes.

Straightening my stooped back, slow and with care, I look at Gene who stands on the edge of the garden, staring into the sky. No sweat pastes his dark curls to his forehead or runs down his skinny neck. He’s looking directly at the sun without squinting.

“Stop it Gene,” I say. “Look away from the sun.”

He looks at me, then to the little row of pits I’ve just dug.

“I’m glad you decided to come outside, but if you’re going to be out here, you’re also going to
help. Hand me those tomato seedlings.” I point to them; little leafy things held hostage by flimsy plastic, doomed for the moment to live in four tiny cells, a cubicle life raft.

Gene bends his knees to pick them up and walks over to me, trodding down the zucchini I planted thirty minutes ago.

“Watch where you’re stepping!” I yell.

He stops, drops the seedlings, and stares at the ground, mouth agape. The seedlings fall to the ground, and their container splits open across one side, spilling two of the plants onto the dry soil.

Gene shifts his feet to turn around and look at the zucchini, stepping on the two escapees.

“Gene!” I scream. “Stop, just stop! Don’t move!” He stops and looks up to the horizon.

“What do I do?” he says. His right foot crushes the two seedlings. One has been snapped at the base of the stem leaving the cube of soil containing its roots free to roll away and die its own death.

“Lift your right foot up exactly six inches, then over eight inches, then down.” I think I’m crying but the tears and sweat mix together, hot and bitter and biting, and I can’t discern which is which.

“Now walk out of the garden and take care not to step on the zucchini again.” He follows my directions perfectly.

“And now?” Gene says turning to look at me, without remorse or knowledge.

The zucchini is all right, just a few torn leaves, but the seedlings fare worse. Two are fine; one has a snapped stem. It’s not broken off so it can possibly survive, but the last is gone, a waste of twenty dollars and a loss of at least four cans of tomatoes.

“Clean the dirt off your shoes and go in the house.”

“What will I do in there?”

“I don’t care! Just go!” I shoo Gene away without looking at him—furious at him, at Ben, at my Gene for leaving me alone to raise such an ungrateful and rootless boy. At myself, so desperate for the love of that same boy that I would take this one into my home, letting him call me Grandma.

I squat and lift the salvageable plant from where it lies, smashed and broken. Cupping in one hand the earthen cube which holds its roots and supporting its stalk with the other, I place it with care in the last of the little pits, the one I just dug, the deepest one. The drying pile of earth fills the hole and keeps the seedling’s wound secure inches below the surface. I feel like a horticultural bonesetter.

Removing the two untouched seedlings from their life raft, I give them homes in the ground in the next couple of pits, then look to the twained remains of the last seedling. It will go in the compost and give its life for next year’s garden.

A high, thin buzz sounding like a bee on helium comes from over east of the soy fields, and I turn to see a black speck whirring about ninety feet off the ground heading for my home. The drone reaches me after a few minutes, hovering above the woodpile before descending and approaching me. It whirs in place, an insect thing of rotors and spindles, four large camera lenses affixed on four narrow sides.

The cameras shift and tilt to look beneath the drone and it alights on top of the compost bin.

“What,”

I say. A tinny canned voice sputters from somewhere within its little frame, speaking without inflection.

“Are you Erin Elizabeth Troyer?”

“I suppose I am, most days. Yes.”

“Due to your lack of Network access, this drone has been dispatched from the Chicago office of the Commercial Bureau of Leasing and Investigation to relay a message to you.”

“They could have called,” I say.

“You will be billed accordingly,” it continues. “Failure to accept the charges will result in fines.

Do you accept the charges?”

“Fine,” I say and stand up from the ground creaking and unsteady. “Yes.”

Something in the drone’s voice clicks and an audio recording begins.

“You’re a hard woman to find, Ms. Troyer. I’m Detective Richard Corden, lead of Sales and Leasing Coordination and Investigation for the Chicago bureau. I’m contacting you to inform you that your son, Benjamin Zachary Troyer, and his wife Anna Reign Troyer, have defected from the Americas Group to the New Amalgamated British Isles. We’re not entirely sure as to why, but I understand your son’s coworkers at the Commercial Center for National Marketing are being questioned, and we’ve got the boys here in R&D looking in to it as well.

“Until we can get your son extradited—well really it’s more of an ‘if’ than ‘when’ type of situation. Anyway, your son is no longer considered an American consumer, and, as such, all his current lease agreements pass to the next of kin, which is you. Most of his major products are still at their home in the Capital—the hovercraft, the VR modules and system, and the two dogs—but I understand that the Substitutional Progeny Unit is currently in your possession, which is wonderful for you. It’s by far the most expensive of these products and would have cost a tidy sum to ship there from D.C.

“You can give this drone your verbal assent to accept the terms of the lease, which will be provided for you at a later date, probably in the next few days. I wish we could get them to you sooner, but without being able to reach you via Network, our hands are somewhat tied. I strongly urge you, Ms. Troyer, to get Network access as soon as possible to avoid further fees and charges associated with this transfer of leases and product. We will contact you again soon. If you need, you can reach me at the... uh, nevermind. Just, please, purchase Network access. They offer multiple and affordable tiers and plans.”

The message ends, and an advertisement for edible deodorant plays. It’s supposed to taste like bacon.

When the ad is over, the drone’s voice comes back and asks for my verbal assent. “What happens if I refuse?” I say.

“Refusal to accept the transfer and terms of lease will result in fines totaling up to twenty thousand dollars and/or incarceration as well as consumer rehabilitation.”

“What happens if Gene becomes damaged, broken, or destroyed?”

“Destruction of product will result in fines totaling up to 200 percent of the product’s cost and incarceration as well as consumer rehabilitation.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Of course. As a consumer of the Americas Group you always have the freedom of choice.”

“Consider this my verbal assent to the transfer of lease.”

The drone lets out a happy jingle, and its rotors buzz back to life. It ascends to the same ninety-foot level and whirs back toward Chicago.

I had so much love Ben, and you bled me dry. So much love, so little returned, and too little left.

I yell for Gene, and he comes out of the house and puts his shoes on while sitting on the porch swing. I bend down to pick up the long spade and lean on it like a cane. Sweat pours from my head and soaks my T-shirt, from my armpits and soaks my bra. My breathing is heavy, and I feel a little dizzy.

Gene ties his shoes and comes to the edge of the garden.

“What is it Grandma?”

I shuffle through the earth and step over the zucchini. I’m shaking but manage to heft the spade and
thrust it into Gene’s face. His hands shoot up in a protective stance, but he can’t see anything because I’ve lodged the spade in his eyes.

“Grandma, do not molest me.”

I yank the spade out of his head with a quick move and almost fall over before regaining my balance. My hands choke up on the handle, and I hold it like a baseball bat and swing with fresh adrenaline. The spade connects with Gene’s chest flat and hard. He crumples to the grass.

“Grandma, do not molest me. This action is in violation of Dad’s lease agreement.”

I ignore him and begin to beat his head with the flat side of the spade, tearing away the rubber sponge of his skin to reveal a translucent plastic skull, the color and opacity of egg white fried thin and quick.

Gene’s arms and legs flail, searching for purchase on something, but his voice remains calm.

“Network connection unavailable, cannot contact commercial authorities. Network connection unavailable, cannot contact commercial authorities.” His eyes, shattered bulbs of plastic and wire, dangle from their sockets unseeing.

I beat him and beat him and split the plastic of his skull with the spade’s edge, exposing a shining platinum brain. I strike it, and sparks explode and singe the dry grass. The legs stop, and then the arms. Gene’s mouth opens and closes and opens with a strained mechanical precision. A ringing on the edge of audible perception comes from somewhere deep within his chest, and a coyote howls from far across the soy fields.

I collapse onto the ground, my feet in the grass and my head in the garden, mangling the zucchini.

The adrenaline has burned out, and I can feel every strained muscle and ligament coming awake. In a minute, if I can, I’ll get up and begin digging a large pit at the north end of the garden where the corn will grow. But then I hear that high thin whir again and squint to see a black speck far above my head silhouetted against the sky.

It’s fine Gene, it’s fine. I loved you.

A Mind of Its Own

Part I: Artificial Intelligence

Edward M. Lerner | 6746 words

In June 2014, the Internet was abuzz with reports intimating that artificial intelligence (AI) had truly arrived. More specifically, “Eugene Goostman,” a chatbot, having passed the “Turing test,” was credited with having crossed a threshold popularly held to distinguish narrowly intelligent behavior in software from “strong” AI.

That opening paragraph is rife with terms that merit definition and interpretation, and we’ll come to those. That said, readers of Analog aren’t exactly novices when it comes to AI. Many of you in your thoughts have sped ahead to some Big Questions:

• Is “Eugene Goostman” truly intelligent? If not, when might another program be? Or will artificial intelligence ever happen?

• What is “strong” AI, anyway?

• If an Age of Artificial Intelligence is upon us, should we rejoice—or panic?

On that last—and, as we shall see, existential—question, science fiction has endlessly speculated.

1 Will mobile AIs, otherwise known as robots, be cute and harmless (like Number 5 in the 1986
movie Short Circuit), devoted helpers (like Rosie of the 1962 TV series The Jetsons), amiable slackers (like Bender of the 1999 TV series Futurama), or dedicated to killing us all (like the eponymous characters of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series)? 2 Will sufficiently advanced AI guide and protect humanity, like the Eschaton of Singularity Sky (Charles Stross, 2003) or deem us competitors to be eliminated (like Skynet, of the Terminator movie and TV franchise)?

You likely won’t be surprised to know that the evidence—and opinions—are mixed. Before we delve into those questions, we have a few basics to cover.

What is intelligence?

The “artificial” part of AI seems clear enough: something that we, rather than Nature, caused to happen. But what about the “intelligence” part? That’s a lot less clear.

In common meaning (using the first definition on Dictionary.com), intelligence involves the

“capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.”

At the heart of that vague definition is something about handling abstraction, often symbol manipulation (words, after all, being symbols). The ways we most commonly characterize intelligence and mental accomplishment assume the same. The (in)famous IQ (Intelligence Quotient) test focuses on language and mathematical skills—and words, surely, are as much symbols as numbers and mathematical operators. The academic SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) that many of us take toward the end of high school also emphasizes language and mathematical skills.

Some people are more adept with language than with numbers and logic—and vice versa. Some are better working with their hands— whether playing a violin, fixing a car engine, or working a

Rubik’s Cube—than with abstract thought. Some are most skilled at sensing and evoking others’

emotions. 3 Does any one of these skills entail more intelligence than any other, or are they merely different?

It can be difficult to distinguish intelligence from knowledge. Consider two individuals with identical understanding of the rules of grammar and vocabularies of identical size. They might score differently on the part of an “intelligence” test assessing language skills because of the specific words each knows (or doesn’t know). Likewise consider assessing the mathematical skills of individuals taught basic arithmetic by different methods, one to use a calculator and the other drilled to memorize the multiplication tables and do long division with pencil and paper. Consider the decline of in-our-own-heads knowledge as we rely more and more upon Google.

Does that last paragraph seem abstract? Consider this contrast. I expect I would fare as poorly abandoned in the Amazonian rainforest as the most competent denizen from that environment would fare abandoned in a North American city. Each of us is the same person the moment after the switch—
and so, presumably, as intelligent—as the moment before, and yet, in that instant, we both become maladapted. In both cases, our post-switch neighbors might consider us hopelessly stupid.

That thought experiment suggests intelligence depends on context. If yes, then we might have problems assessing the intelligence of aliens, even those who have demonstrated their technological competence by crossing interstellar distances to meet us. (And should they covet our real estate, consider how we might struggle to demonstrate our intelligence to them.) At least in the case of biological aliens we can expect to have some shared experiences in the form of physical phenomena: hot and cold, heavy objects falling due to gravity, and the like. We may have our differences, too. Beings who “see” with ultrasound, communicate by swapping chemical markers, or live in water will surely have a different “context” than humans.

And a computer-resident entity? Imagine just how little we’ll have in common with it.

Cyberneticist Kevin Warwick proposes as a context-neutral definition of intelligence: “the variety of information processing processes that collectively enable a being to autonomously pursue its survival.”

If and how an entity—human or software— survives depends upon its environment. What must a program (or any other artificial implementation of information processing, and we’ll come to non-programming approaches) do to survive? Perhaps no more than be useful. In other cases—another topic yet ahead— Darwinian competition applies.

Weak AI

In our daily encounters, we expect people to demonstrate minimal competence at many intelligence-requiring tasks—and we have a variety of unflattering terms for anyone who doesn’t. If a person excels at just one mental task—say, multiplying long numbers in his head—while doing poorly, or failing altogether, at most other tasks, some might (and too often will) deem that person an “idiot savant.” That’s not a term we use when the entity exhibiting such extreme specialization is something we’ve built....

Then we call it an AI.

A special-purpose, aka narrow, aka weak artificial intelligence is built to handle a particular category of problem. Such weak AIs have become legion, as have the underlying technologies, and entire books are devoted to discussing even a single weak-AI technique. We’ll content ourselves here
with a few illustrative examples. (Real-world examples, that is. These aren’t the kinds of AI that drive story plots.)

An expert system encapsulates the specialized knowledge of domain experts, and draws inferences from that knowledge. MYCIN, a demonstration system worked on through much of the

’70s, used several hundred IF/THEN “rules” to diagnose infectious diseases. An expert system basically matches inputs (say, “IF patient complains of achiness and fever”) against its rule base to produce outputs (an interim conclusion to be input to other rules, or the decision to request further data, or a final diagnosis: “THEN it’s influenza”).

Expert systems can require certainty in their inputs (e.g., “IF patient has a skin rash”), and produce a definitive—whether or not correct—output; newer implementations sometimes use fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic applies statistical inference to accommodate uncertainty in inputs (“patient may have a skin rash”) and assign a probability to conclusions.

Game-playing programs abound. It was big news in 1997 when, for the first time, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the human chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Game-playing AI falls within the broader category of problem-solving. This AI subset deals in exploring options (for example, all the program’s possible next moves in a chess match), and what might happen next (all the opponent’s possible responses to every possible move), and the program’s possible counter-responses to those possible responses... rapidly expanding into the toomany-scenarios overload that mathematicians call a “combinatorial explosion.” The enumeration of possible moves/countermoves/ counter-countermoves... can be represented graphically as a branching “decision tree”— and to settle upon one next move within any practical time limit generally requires “pruning” the tree. Pruning entails deducing, for example, that any outcome from following Branch A is less optimal than at least some outcome somewhere along Branch B, and hence nothing along Branch A need be further considered.

Sometimes such simplifying inferences are drawn correctly, and sometimes not.

Pattern matching is another basic weak-AI technology. Using digitized sound as input, pattern matching underlies speaker recognition, a type of biometric identification. Applied to digital images, pattern matching gives us object recognition or (with a lot more computing) scene recognition and facial recognition. With streaming video as input, pattern matching of road hazards is an enabling technology for self-driving vehicles. Data mining searches for patterns in masses of data; it’s the technology underpinning recommendation engines at etailers like Amazon and Netflix. Data-mining applications can be yet more mundane, as when Google Street View uses AI to distinguish house addresses from other numbers in street scenes. 4 Predictive analytics combines data mining with (an imminent topic) machine learning to make forecasts. Of course, inferring the presence of a pattern isn’t the same as validating the pattern, as many an offbeat etailer recommendation will attest.

Pattern matching also underpins that most serious of real-world applications: searching within and among huge data archives for evidence of national-security threats. “Connecting the dots” to identify terrorist networks and threats, facial recognition to locate a fugitive from the glimpse of a face in a crowd, and scanning phone conversations for suspicious keywords are how we most often encounter weak AI in fiction. We would all be much safer if these processes worked as accurately and as quickly in real life as in the typical spy or police-procedural drama. 5

A popular misconception is that because AI implementations (usually) involve computer programming, an AI cannot exceed the knowledge its programmer coded into it. Many AIs, however, are built capable of machine learning. A medical expert system, for example, may be tested with well-documented patient cases; rules that lead from symptoms to misdiagnoses can then be deemphasized, fine- tuned, or removed. An AI with the ability to assess its conclusions can, on an
ongoing basis, take such corrective action on its own. Your email service likely uses an AI-based spam filter that learns from user inputs (specific messages that you and others have flagged as spam) and content patterns the filter itself encounters too often. Example-based machine translation also uses machine learning, inferring from training sets (pairings of untranslated texts with human-expert-produced translations) how to translate other texts. Probabilistic programming languages may extend machine learning to domains fraught with uncertainty. 6 Deep learning applies several learning algorithms in succession to datasets.

How good is machine learning? Good enough to power the rent-your-spare-room pricing algorithm for Airbnb. 7 At the same time, far from optimum. DARPA, in kicking off its Probabilistic Programming for Advanced Machine Learning initiative, opined in 2013, “Improvements on the order of two to four magnitude (sic) over the state of the art are likely necessary.” 8

The list of weak AI techniques continues, of course, and in combination they can form yet more powerful tools. Speech recognition and natural-language understanding—as exemplified by Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Google Now, and Amazon Echo’s Alexa—combine several levels of processing. Pattern matching can isolate the specific words in a spoken stream, but syntactic and semantic processing are needed to make sense of words in combination. As amusing (or maddening) as our interaction with our digital assistants can sometimes be, it’s clear that these tools remain limited. And in breaking news as I type, a game-playing program with learning capability has had notable success with the harder-than-chess strategy game, Go.

Getting with the program (not!)

Research into artificial intelligence began with conventional programming (LISP, Prolog, and Python are popular programming languages in the AI-development community), but AI development is not limited to coding.

Genetic algorithms simulate biological evolution. Take a simple programmed solution to a problem, a set of possibly applicable algorithms, or a set of possible components to a solution. Make copies of your starting point, then randomly alter the copies. Select those altered versions that do the best at solving the problem, then copy and alter them. Repeat until the most successful variants converge in their recommendations (or you run out of time or patience).

Neural nets are loosely modeled on neural tissue, a neural net being a simulated mesh of simulated (and simplified) neurons. If the sum of the weighted values of all inputs to a “neuron”

exceeds a preset threshold, that neuron fires; if not, not. By firing or not firing—in more familiar/digital terms, outputting a zero or a one—the neuron generates either an input to a next-in-line neuron(s) or an output from the overall net.

A neural net is trained, rather than programmed, to analyze data. Imagine that inputs to a neural net represent disease symptoms, while outputs from the net represent possible diagnoses. The connections among neurons within the net are given weightings, typically all equal to start. Symptom sets are applied to the net’s external inputs, and the human overseeing the training (or, in some instances, an automated feedback mechanism) assesses the net’s external output(s). After each set, any connections that led to the expected output/diagnosis are given more weight, and connections that led to incorrect diagnoses are given less weight. The process is repeated for another symptom set, and a third, and... As the network trains on many examples, and its many connections undergo many adjustments, its representation of any particular element of learning is (just as in the human brain)

widely distributed and intermixed/overlaid with other learning.

Neuromorphic computing strives to more closely emulate the functionality of biological neural tissue, by using analog, rather than digital, circuitry. Neuromorphic (more or less, “brainlike”) computing has been applied to pattern-recognition problems, such as facial recognition. 10

Neuromorphic computing is being slowly scaled up toward whole brain emulation. 11 WBE
might enable researchers to work around the gaps in our understanding of intelligence by transferring patterns from a naturally occurring brain onto an artificial substrate. With neuromorphically-modeled neurons (and we don’t yet necessarily know the optimal degree of fidelity to biological neurons), the Blue Brain Project has copied a small portion of a rat brain: about thirty-one thousand neurons and forty million synapses. (In very round numbers, the human brain has about one hundred billion neurons and one hundred trillion synapses.) 12 So far, this simulation has been used to improve our understanding of brain architecture and function, rather than to build problem-solving tools.

Will WBE prove viable? If not with a straightforward extrapolation of today’s technology, then—
piling speculation upon speculation—perhaps when nanobot swarms can navigate the brain and ascertain its finest details? To be determined. As one cautionary note, consider the many failed attempts to find something unique in Albert Einstein’s preserved brain to explain his genius. 13

The common touch

One reason present-day AIs seem so, well, artificial, is that they sometimes react so differently than we would—they are without “common sense.” That is, they don’t use “common knowledge” to interpret circumstances, or to decide upon a course of action.

Of course, most of what we consider common knowledge is acquired, not innate. When you aren’t on duty to clean up afterward, it’s enlightening to watch a baby in a highchair testing—over and over

—the working hypothesis that “things fall.”

Common knowledge has its flaws. It’s replete with generalizations that need exceptions (“Helium balloons don’t fall”), biases (“Those people are prone to...”), and misconceptions (“Summer arrives when Earth is closest in its orbit to the Sun”). Common knowledge, and so, common sense, are situational—even about ourselves. Humans don’t read facial expressions consistently; it ought not to surprise anyone that AIs must learn the skill. 14

We humans know (or believe we do) a lot about the world and our civilization. If an AI is to exhibit (a human-centric version of) common sense, it needs access to our common knowledge. To capture that knowledge in machine-useable form is a massive undertaking. In one attempt at tackling that problem, thousands of volunteers with the crowd-sourced Open Mind Common Sense project contributed over a million English-language facts (and more in other languages). 15

As those numbers suggest, “common knowledge” encompasses a wide range of topics. To apply such varied information requires transcending the narrow, domainspecific types of AI we have considered thus far.

Moravec’s paradox

Real-world AI, as we have seen, focuses on specific tasks. However impressed you may be with a self-driving car, the speech recognition in your smartphone, or a chess program, none of them is your
equal. However well an AI performs its specialized job, you do many things better.

Roboticist Hans Moravec summarized the situation this way. “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

Perhaps this unevenness of progress shouldn’t surprise us. Logic, symbol manipulation, language, problem solving: these are abilities that evolution only recently introduced. Nature hasn’t had much time to optimize the related parts of the brain, so we consider these functions hard. Perhaps we casually walk on two legs, synthesize in a glance the interconnectedness of visually cluttered scenes, and read facial expressions, not because these tasks are simple, but because the regions of our brains that handle these tasks have been optimized.

Whatever explanation may underlie Moravec’s paradox, we’re unlikely to consider an AI truly intelligent until it masters a significant subset of human skills.

Strong AI

A general-purpose, aka complete, aka strong artificial intelligence isn’t limited to one or a few specialized problem domains. Instead, a strong AI will—because this goal remains aspirational!—
perform any intellectual task as well, though not necessarily by the same means, as a human. Some longstanding challenges of AI, including computer vision, natural-language understanding, and common sense, are believed to require strong AI. (We won’t be sure, of course, until we’ve cracked those problems. AI researchers once predicted that a championship-level chess program would be

“AI complete.” Having solved the chess problem but not the strong AI problem, now we know better.) 16

There is progress. Take, for example, natural-language understanding. In 2011, IBM’s program Watson famously played the game show Jeopardy! against past (human) champions, and won. That victory required impressive amounts of natural-language understanding, general knowledge, and reasoning. It wasn’t sufficient, for example, for Watson to identify and search on keywords from the Jeopardy! “answer”; the program also had to formulate one question from all the data returned to its queries.

But even “Jeopardy! genius” falls short of strong AI. Perhaps that’s best illustrated by the first commercial application IBM chose to make of its Watson technology: a digital assistant for recommending cancer treatments. 17 Sounds like a weak-AI application, doesn’t it?

Collective AI

Computer systems become more capable as they accumulate and share data.

So do we. Humans began amassing and sharing knowledge long before computers, using spoken language, memorized lore, written language, libraries, printing presses, telegraph, telephone, and television. And often progress begets progress.... It’s as though humanity has a collective intelligence.

We may not be smarter individually than our forbears, but collectively? 18 Employing the full power of the tools we’ve built for ourselves? That’s a different story. As a civilization, we’ve made enormous strides. To ancestors of a century ago, much less of a millennium ago, modern humanity’s collective/societal intelligence would seem astonishing. Perhaps, even, artificial.

Transhuman AI

In “Human 2.0: Being All We Can Be,” I discussed at length some ways (and SFnal examples thereof) in which we might soon use technology to increase our intelligence. Genetic engineering. Neural implants. Minds uploaded to computers. As long as we are our own standard of intelligence, many forms of transhuman would appear to qualify as artificial (or, at least, artificially) intelligent.

Rational AI

With so many potential routes to artificial intelligence, Kevin Warwick (whose non-anthropomorphic definition of intelligence we considered earlier), proposes that rather than weak and strong AI, instead of seeing ourselves as the standard of reference, we should frame the topic in terms of rational AI. He writes: “Rational AI means that any artefact (sic) fulfilling such a general definition can act intelligently and think in its own right, in its own way. Whether this turns out to be in any sense similar to intelligence, thought, consciousness, self-awareness, etc. of a human is neither here nor there.”

For SF purposes, that, surely, is the definition we can embrace.

Where there’s a will...

There’s a probate. No, wait. That’s a lawyer joke.

Where there’s a will—or shall we say, free will—there is a... what? I may believe that I have free will, but is that so? The existence of free will is considered unprovable.

As a puzzle in physics, what is free will? If my action is an effect, what was its cause? If the Universe is, à la classical mechanics, deterministic, then what place is there for free will? If the Universe is random, as many quantum processes seem to be, then, still, what did some essential I have to do with the action?

How can I know for certain whether you— much less an AI—have free will?

Unless humans have free will, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to care what AIs do. Our robotic overlords will assume power, or not, independent of what we think. Making the assumption humans have free will—while not knowing how it, or the (perhaps) related characteristic of selfawareness, arises— there’s no reason to suppose an AI won’t eventually possess the same trait.

A chess program does not know it’s playing chess. More generally, any unaware AI, no matter how intellectually accomplished, is a tool. We direct it to perform an analysis, and it does. We empower it to take action under particular circumstances, and it does. Like any technology, unaware AI can lead to unforeseen consequences—but when those occur, we have only ourselves to blame.

“Lather. Rinse. Repeat.” is a poorly conceived set of instructions for humans, although most of us will deviate from the program no later than when our first shampoo bottle runs dry. Similar instructions given to a robot might send it pillaging stores for more shampoo.

All this ambiguity notwithstanding, suppose (and we don’t yet know how this might happen) a strong AI comes to be, with the selfawareness to set itself goals and the free will to act upon that motivation. That’s when the future really becomes interesting....

How strong (or rational) AI happens in SF

Our favorite genre has several ideas—and no conclusions—about how such AI will come about.

Often, in fiction, strong AI simply emerges. Some swarms of simple entities (neurons, ants) exhibit complex collective behaviors; for all we know, growth in the number of cerebral neurons and the synapses among them is how human intelligence came about. Story logic extends that analogy to swarms of (not necessarily identical) pieces of software. Robert Heinlein’s 1966 Hugo Award-winning novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has an AI emerge within the complex software of a single supercomputer. Robert J. Sawyer used the spontaneous emergence of intelligence across the worldwide web in his aptly titled WWW trilogy. 21 My 2015 novelette “A Case of Identity” added the premise that for the emergent AI to body an underlying element of indeterminacy.ponents computing—which have free had will, to is the software involve to say, they comquantum had to em22

Other times the strong AI is purposefully evolved: a process of unnatural selection. James P.

Hogan used this premise, in two very different scenarios, in his Locus Award-nominated novels The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979) and Code of the Lifemaker (1983). My 2008 novel Fools’

Experiments (its title excerpted from a famous quotation by Charles Darwin) also involved in-the-computer evolution. 23 Greg Egan’s 2008 novelette “Crystal Nights” offers the forced evolution of an entire civilization of AIs.

Sometimes the basis of the strong AI is handwaving. Isaac Asimov’s extensive robots series (some appearing in the pages of Astounding) offers no explanation beyond “positronic brains.” We know of the HAL 9000, in the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, that it was created at the University of Illinois. 24 A chance lightning strike awakens robot Number Five in Short Circuit.

More and more, AI capability is simply assumed. Like faster-than-light travel, strong AI offers too many great storytelling possibilities not to include in our fictional futures. Skynet of the Terminator franchise “becomes selfaware.” And surely the Universe would be a poorer place absent Marvin the paranoid android of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Robot pet peeves

Our phones and, through them, our even more personal gadgets (like smart watches, augmented-reality glasses, and implanted insulin pumps) have Internet access. Our homes have more and more networked devices, from Nest learning thermostats to Amazon Dash (instant order) buttons to Philips Hue programmable light bulbs. And so, the public networking infrastructure is transitioning from 32-bit addressing (with enough capacity to identify about four billion online devices) to 128-bit addressing (enough for about one hundred trillion trillion trillion online devices), in large measure to accommodate the onrushing Internet of Things.

And yet, I can’t recall a fictional occurrence of a robot with sensible online access. (You do not want to get me started on robots, like Lieutenant Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation, seated at computer terminals, eyeballing screens and keyboarding.)

There’s authorial convenience in cutting robots off from the Internet. Thus isolated, they can’t easily, or remotely, be hacked. They can more readily be ignorant when ignorance advances the
storyline. Their behaviors can diverge, because they can’t fully or easily share what one another have learned and experi- enced. They can become obsolete when their owners are lax or otherwise resistant to returning the bots to the factory for maintenance.

Our phones and computers and sometimes our cars accept software upgrades over the Internet, because any other way of keeping them current is too clumsy, time-consuming, and/or expensive. Our phones run cloud apps like Facebook and Google. Our phones and ebook readers offload data to cloud storage, and we safeguard family photos with cloudbased backup services. Is it credible that robots embodying strong AI would be built without Internet access? Perhaps, in the R & D stage. Not, I submit, once intelligent robots (rather than autonomous vacuum cleaners) become consumer products.

The advantages of connectivity will surely be as evident to a self-aware AI as they are to today’s gadget manufacturers. Let any un-networked robot achieve self-awareness and, I suspect, it will be quick to retrofit itself with WiFi. Once Ava escaped her creator’s lab in the 2015 movie Ex Machina, I anticipate that spot of personal improvement jumped to the top of her to-do list.

Are we there yet?

To recap, we can’t say precisely what intelligence is. Whatever it might be, it appears to have context-specific aspects. If the quest for strong AI someday succeeds, how will we know?

Polymath Alan Turing, widely known for his World War II cryptanalysis achievements, also made many contributions to early computer science. Turing speculated, way back in 1950, about whether machines could think. His insight about recognizing an artificial intelligence was characteristically brilliant: rather than attempt to define an artificial intelligence, describe its behavior. We know (or so we flatter ourselves) one example of intelligent behavior: our own. From that chain of reasoning arose the Turing Test.

This, simplified, is the test: If an entity interacting with human judges—sight unseen, exclusively through written messages—successfully masquerades as a human, then the entity, too, is intelligent.

(The entity’s inability, or disinterest, in masquerading as human doesn’t preclude it from being intelligent—we just might not know how to recognize its version of intelligence.) Rather than passing a test, this process can be seen as the entity winning an imitation game.

And that brings us back to this article’s opening paragraph...

In June 2014, a chatbot calling itself “Eugene Goostman” indeed convinced one of three human judges that it was human. In retrospect, this was as much a demonstration of human gullibility as of software intelligence. Eugene presented itself as a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy, with English as his second language. This ruse pre-excused its repeated misunderstandings and odd responses. 27

(The hero of my Fools’ Experiments took a few shots at the Turing Test: “What kind of criterion was that? Human languages were morasses of homonyms and synonyms, dialects and slang, moods and cases and irregular verbs. Human language shifted over time, often for no better reason than that people could not be bothered to enunciate. ‘I could care less’ and ‘I couldn’t care less’ somehow meant the same thing. If researchers weren’t so anthropomorphic in their thinking, maybe the world would have AI. Any reasoning creature would take one look at natural language and question human intelligence.”)

If the imitation game is so easily, well, gamed, are there better ways to recognize human-grade AI? Perhaps. Consider Winograd schemas, named after computer scientist Terry Winograd. The
essence of any Winograd schema is an intentional ambiguity that is readily resolved applying (human) common sense. Consider this statement and question: “The trophy doesn’t fit in the brown suitcase because it is too big. What is too big?” People, knowing something of trophies and suitcases, can answer that. AIs, perhaps not yet.

Humans use intelligence for more than conversation, so tests of artificial intelligence might extend beyond assessing an entity’s use of language. A mobility test would examine a robot’s ability to navigate through, and operate objects within, a physical environment— as, at the dawn of self-driving vehicles, was done with the DARPA Grand Challenge. A visual test would challenge an AI to understand and describe an image as a person would (“Someone dropped a safe out of the window; it’s about to squash the guy on the street,”) rather than literally and disjointedly (“I see a building, a metal box in the air alongside the building, a person, and some trees”). 29,30,31

Anthropomorphic tests may suffice when the goal is to assess a humanlike AI, like a personal companion and helper for the elderly. Such tests seem inadequate for assessing any AI meant to tackle jobs too hard or too dangerous for us, or for environments very different than our own (as would seem to be a fair description of conditions experienced inside a computer), or an AI built by an extraterrestrial intelligence, or an AI intellectually beyond us.

Suppose AI emerges in our midst on its own. Suppose aliens, or alien AIs, someday come acalling. Let’s hope they have less self-centered definitions of, and tests for, intelligence than we currently do. Alas for humanity, the AIs of my 2016 short story “Turing de Force” do not.

The Chinese room

As previously noted (and the justification for the Turing test), natural-language understanding is considered evidence of strong, or general, AI. Philosopher John Searle begs to differ, asking whether even the most useful construct we might build understands anything.

In a nutshell, here is Searle’s “Chinese room” challenge. I cannot read, speak, or understand Mandarin. Suppose I am closed into a room with an English-language book of instructions. A Mandarin speaker pushes through a slot in the wall a paper covered in Mandarin logograms. By rote, following my book of instructions, I respond to those logograms with new Mandarin text on another sheet of paper, and then I shove the new sheet out through the slit.

Suppose that I follow this procedure so well that the person outside the room, reading my response, concludes—quite mistakenly—that I am a fluent Mandarin speaker. Was my rote following of instructions proof of intelligence? If not, in what sense can an AI, even one that passes a Turing test, be said to be intelligent?

Searle generalizes from the inapplicability of “understanding” that an AI cannot have the property of mind or of consciousness. That’s an extrapolation I (and many others) find an inference too far.

AI ethics (and our own)

Before we entrust an AI with critical re responsibilities, or give an AI access to critical infrastructure, we might want to have a Turing-like test of its ethics. Consider an AI application that has been widely demonstrated and seems close to commercialization: selfdriving cars. Imagine I’m the passenger in a self-driving vehicle, and a moose darts into the road. Will the AI veer, endangering
pedestrians or other drivers? Will it endanger me (and itself) by not veering, and ramming the moose?

If a death(s) is unavoidable, how, and whom, does it choose? Making such judgment calls, on a case-by-case basis, in the split-second during which such decisions must often be made, would seem to require strong AI.

The often-expressed solution to such scenarios is built-in rules. Isaac Asimov famously proposed Three Laws of Robotics to be made integral to every robot. These laws first appeared right here in this magazine, in his short story “Runaround.” 32 The now widely known laws are: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

The laws have their merits, and they made for great stories—because complications invariably arose whenever robots tried to apply them. Without their inherent loopholes and ambiguities in any but the simplest situations, Asimov would never have gotten so many stories out of his laws. 33

Perhaps a robot should sometimes disobey a human’s orders. Consider, for example, the order to walk through fire to accomplish a rescue. The robot knows it can’t succeed, and that it will be destroyed if it tries. Researchers in one lab are experimenting with giving robots the opportunity to apply logic to identifying and overriding such orders. 34

Suppose the Three Laws (or an expanded version) could be made to work. What are the ethics of imposing ethics on a self-aware AI? Conditioning humans to hold specific values is otherwise known as brainwashing.

Done with the best of intentions, installed ethics are apt to become obsolete, even embarrassingly obsolete, ethics. Not so very long ago, many human societies considered slavery, rigid class structures, interracial marriage bans, forced sterilization of “inferiors,” and other (by present-day standards) shockingly awfully behaviors entirely ethical. Ethics we build into an AI today, we might rue tomorrow.

It might be best for us to teach ethics thinking to AIs. An ethical robot might not obsess about shampoo production to the exclusion of all else.

A debate—with an ethical component, surely—currently raging among humans is whether and how to deploy fully autonomous weapons. Today’s automated weapons platforms, such as unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with air-tosurface missiles, can’t initiate an attack; a person-in-the-loop fires the missiles. But could an AI be empowered to fire missiles at a target that matches a specific profile? AIs excel at pattern matching, so it’s hard to see why not. If a gamechanging weapon—such as, say a self-directed UAV or robotic tank— can be built, someone usually does. And so, the United Nations has sponsored efforts for a global ban on robotic weapons 35 while others argue against such bans. 36 Perhaps now is an appropriate time to revisit robotics ethics.

SF, of course, has long envisioned robot and Cyborg warriors, fighting both alongside and against us. The 2013 TV series Almost Human offers android cops and soldiers. The 2015 movie Chappie deals with paramilitary robots, and the eponym’s eventual resistance to immoral orders. In written format, we have AIbased battle tanks of Keith Laumer’s Bolo series and all manner of AI-based killing machines in Fred Saberhagen’s death-to-all-life Berserkers.

Where we are— and where we’re going

We’ve surveyed the status of current/weak AI, considered its limitations, and mused about possible paths forward to strong AI. We’ve pondered how we might recognize strong AI if it arose, and about the ethical implications. We’ve glimpsed a tiny part of SF’s AI explorations.

Suppose strong/general AI someday does arrive. Quite possibly, its (or their) capabilities will continue to improve—and on an Internet timescale, not some leisurely human pace. What might happen? What can, or should, humans do about the possibility, whether in preparation or afterward?

Great questions! For possible answers, check back to the October 2016 issue for “A Mind of Its Own/Part II: Superintelligence.”

Footnotes:

1 AI is pervasive in SF, as both plot device and background element. I’m certain to have skipped examples you would have chosen.

2 I intentionally omitted from that list the Karel Čapek 1920 drama R.U.R. Čapek gets the credit for introducing the word “robot” (from the Czech “robota,” for forced labor) into many languages, but the abused workers of Rossum’s Universal Robots were artificial people rather than robots in the modern/mechanical sense.

3 Is “emotional intelligence” a thing? When a psychologist exhibits it, we might think so. When a pickup artist uses the same ability to ply his craft, we may be less favorably inclined. Either way, the ability to recognize subtle emotional cues and make emotional connections has evolutionary value, whether in the transition from every man for himself to cooperation, or an individual’s reproductive success.

If humanity is to coexist with robots, it will surely be useful for them to recognize, interpret, and respond to our moods. That skill goes beyond parsing what we say to (as examples) reading tones of voice and facial expressions, then inferring from that information our emotional state. See “A Robot in
the

Family,”

Erico

Guizzo,

IEEE

Spectrum,

January

2015,
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/home-robots/
how-aldebaran-robotics-built-its-
friendlyhumanoid-robot-pepper and “Robots with Heart,” Pascale Fung, Scientific American, November 2015.

4 “Inside the Artificial Brain That’s Remaking the Google Empire,” Robert McMillan, Wired, July 16, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/07/ google_brain/.

5 I have opinions about how much data the government should (or shouldn’t) collect, and under what circumstances. I have an opinion, too, about Edward Snowden disclosing NSA data-collection programs. We’ll consider all that beyond the scope of the article.

6 “Programs and Probability,” Brian Hayes, American Scientist, September-October 2015, http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/pr ograms-and-probability.

7 “How Much Is Your Spare Room Worth?” Dan Hill, IEEE Spectrum, September 2015, http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-secret-of airbnbs-pricing-algorithm.

8 “So It Begins: Darpa Sets Out to Make Computers That Can Teach Themselves,” Robert Beckhusen, Wired, March 21, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/03/darpa-machinelearning-2/. DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), having brought us the Internet and run the 2004-05
self-driving vehicle Grand Challenges, has plenty of credibility in matters of computing and AI.

That quote should, presumably, have read (emphasis added), “... on the order of two to four orders of magnitude...”

9 “Google’s AI Masters the Game of Go a Decade Earlier Than Expected,” Will Knight, MIT

Technology Review, January 27, 2016, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/546066/googles-ai-masters-the-game-of-go-a-decade-earlier-than-expected/.

10 One of the pluses of neuromorphic computing is its admirable power-stinginess compared to traditional computing models. Among applications that might exploit that power stinginess are larger and larger neural nets.

See “IBM cracks open a new era of computing with brain-like chip: 4096 cores, 1 million neurons, 5.4 billion transistors,” Sebastian Anthony, Extremetech, August 7, 2014, http://www.extremetech.com/
extreme/187612-ibm-cracks-open-anew-era-of-computing-with-brain-like-chip-4096cores-1-million-neurons-5-4-billion-transistors. 11

11 https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/neuromorphic-computing-platform1

12 “Detailed, Digital Rat Brain Shows Individual

Neurons,”

Glenn

McDonald,

Discovery,

October

11,

2015,
http://news.discovery.com/tech/biotechnology/detailed-digital-rat-brain-shows-individual-neurons-151011.

13 “Genius in a Jar,” Brian D. Burrell, Scientific

American

September

2015,
http://www.

nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v313/n

3/full/scientificamerican0915-82.html (abstract; full article is behind a pay wall).

14 “Perception of Facial Expressions Differs Across Cultures,” American Psychological Association,

September

1,

2011,
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2011/09/facial-
expressions.aspx.

15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_ Mind_Common_Sense 16 No AI yet built knows that it’s playing chess or has any motivation to play, much less could one have invented chess. A program able to do any of those things might be a strong AI. 17

17 http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/ en/ibmwatson/watson-oncology.html 18 Perhaps we’re a little smarter. Historical IQ tests—after backing out the periodic renormalizations done to maintain an average score of 100— suggest a slow upward trend (about 3

IQ points per decade) dating back to the 1930s. That rise (aka the Flynn Effect), according to some studies, plateaued in developed countries in the 1990s. If the improvement was due to improved health and nutrition, all the potential improvements may have been achieved. And perhaps, for a while, we just become better test takers.

See “Is Our Collective IQ Increasing?”, Na Eun Oh, Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, January

13,

2013,
http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/2013/02/is-our-collective-iq-
increasing/#.Vp6Sc1mnq0N.

19 January/February and March 2016 issues.

20 Artificial Intelligence: The Basics, Kevin Warwick.

21 Wake (2009), Watch (2010), and Wonder (2011). Wake, the opening novel of the series, first appeared as an Analog serial (November 2008 through March 2009).

22 “A Case of Identity” appeared in the December 2015 issue of Analog. For a look at quantum indeterminacy, see “A Certain Uncertainty” (my guest Alternate View column), in the April 2016
issue.

23 Survival Instinct, serialized in the October and November 2002 issues, became a part of that
novel.

24 In 1968, with a few hundred fellow Illini, I first saw 2001 in a theatre on the outskirts of the U of I campus. Perhaps not surprisingly, we accepted unquestioningly our university’s development of a self-aware strong AI.

Per Wikipedia, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novelization of the film offers background about the HAL

9000 and its subsequent mental breakdown.

25 THHGTTG began in 1978 as a BBC radio serial. It’s since been a stage show, TV series, video game, movie, novel, and comic book.

26 Turing didn’t name the test after himself; he called the procedure an imitation game. See

“Computing

Machinery
and

Intelligence,”

A.

M.

Turing,

Mind,

October

1950,
http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433 and “What Turing Himself Said About the Imitation Game,” Diane Proudfoot, IEEE Spectrum, July, 2015, http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/whatturing-himself-said-about-the-imitation-game.

Just to confuse us, the 2014 biopic about Turing, The Imitation Game, deals with Turing’s cryptanalytic endeavors during World War II and not his speculations about machine intelligence.

27 “Virtual Tween Passes Turing Test,” Douglas

McCormick, IEEE Spectrum, June 10, 2014 http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artifi cialintelligence/virtual-tween-passes-turing-test.

28 “Can Winograd Schemas Replace Turing Test for Defining Human-Level AI?”, Evan Ackerman http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/art ificial-intelligence/winograd-schemas-replace-tur ing-test-for-defining-humanlevel-artificial-intelli IEEE Spectrum, July 29, 2014 gence/.

29 “DARPA and Drone Cars: How the US Military Spawned Self-Driving Car Revolution,” Denise Chow, Live Science, March 21, 2014 http://www.livescience.com/44272-darpa-self-dri ving-car-revolution.html.

30 “Artificial-Intelligence Experts to Explore Turing Test Triathlon,” Lee Gomes, IEEE Spectrum January 19, 2015, http://spectrum.ieee.org/robot ics/artificial-intelligence/artificialintelligence experts-to-explore-turing-test-triathlon/.

31 “AI Researchers Propose a Machine Vision Turing Test,” Lee Gomes, IEEE Spectrum, March 10, 2015, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/ai-researchers-pro pose-a-machine-vision-turing-test/.

32 March 1942 issue (of Astounding).

33 And I wouldn’t have gotten my first published story, here in Analog. “What a Piece of Work Is Man,” in the February 1991 issue, deals with an AI driven to suicide by an implication of the Three Laws.

34 “Researchers Teaching Robots How to Best Reject Orders from Humans,” Evan Ackerman, IEEE

Spectrum,

November

19,

2015,
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificialintelligence/researchers-teaching-robots-how-tobest-reject-orders-from-humans/.

35 “United Nations Seeks to Head off Rise of Killer Robots,” Bryant Jordan, Military.com, Dec 20, 2015,
http://www.military.com/dailynews/2015/12/20/united-nations-seeks-to-headoff-rise-of-killer-robots.html.

36 “We Should Not Ban ‘Killer Robots,’ and Here’s Why,” Evan Ackerman, IEEE Spectrum, July 29, 2015,
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/we-should-not-ban-killer-robots.

About the author

A physicist and computer scientist, Edward M. Lerner toiled for thirty years in the vineyards of aerospace and high tech. Then, suitably intoxicated, he began writing science fiction full time. When not prospecting beneath his sofa cushions for small change for his first spaceflight, he writes technothrillers like Energized (powersats), traditional SF like his InterstellarNet series (SETI, First Contact, interstellar communications networks, and alien conflict), and, with Larry Niven, the Fleet of Worlds series of space operas. Ed’s website is http://edwardmlerner.com.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

—Carl Sagan

Paint It Black

Bruce Boston | 11 words

In the dead heart
of a collapsar
lies a locked door
to another universe.

EDITORIAL

Trevor Quachri | 1879 words

CAPTAIN AMERICA’S BATHROOM

I’ve mentioned on a few previous occasions that when I was growing up, I at least dabbled in just about every geeky pastime I came across. Most proved to be educational in their own ways. The benefits of backyard astronomy and garage electronics projects are self-evident to the typical Analog reader; rolling giant piles of dice in tabletop games helped me with multiplication; comic books were mostly a source of advanced vocabulary. (I was the only one of my prepubescent peers who used

“imbecile” and “cretin” as insults—thanks, Dr. Doom.)

Most of these hobbies came and went for various reasons, but (outside of SF) it was comic books that held on most tightly over the years. The vast majority of my collection has long since been bequeathed to younger relatives who would put them to use rather than let them sit in a closet collecting dust. But I still stick my head back into comic shops from time to time, just to catch up—
and sometimes to see if they carry this fine publication. (I’m evidence that there is overlap in audience). I also still think about comic books and superheroes a lot. (If we could tally up all my random thoughts in a day, superheroes would rank below my family and this job, but above what I’m going to have for my next meal, probably. It’s pretty high up there.) That shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise; setting aside the child-like joy of seeing people in garish outfits beating the tar out of each other, there’s a lot to be learned about characterization from the bright diamonds of distilled motivation at the heart of most comic book characters. At their best, they’re simple, succinct concepts that are developed, complicated, given nuance, deconstructed, and reconstructed over the years.

I was a small, sensitive, bookish kid, a prime target for bullies until I learned to stand up for myself. It would be more of a surprise if someone like Spider-Man didn’t resonate with me.

Unfortunately, my self-actualization didn’t also come with commensurate self-reflection, and my self-defense became more “proactive” than it ought to have been. Eventually a light bulb went off, and darker characters, particularly ones who had been Bad Guys at one point but were trying to do better, like The Shadow and Marvel’s Moon Knight, resonated with me.

And on it went. As I got older and my emotional maturity and intellectual understanding of the world improved, I’d find new characters who I felt I understood.

There were some who simply never clicked for me, though. Superman was a bore, a juvenile power fantasy even among juvenile power fantasies, a flat character who always did good, yet rarely put himself at risk.

The same went for Captain America. His ideals were so broad as to be meaningless—a walking Pledge of Allegiance wrapped in a lecture from Dad. Yawn.

Or so I thought.

Having a daughter a few months ago made me realize that, at forty, while I may have missed my window to truly identify with Superman, I did have something of a late appreciation of Pa Kent.

2013’s Man of Steel movie adaptation suggested that even Superman’s parents would fear for their
son, to the point of suggesting that maybe he should have let a bus full of classmates drown rather than risk exposing his identity to the world. I understand that on some level; as a parent, there’s a certain selfishness that’s part of the job. I don’t care if he or she can save the world; if it puts your kid at risk, to hell with everyone else. But I think the film’s inclusion of that impulse starts too late in the Kents’

relationship to their adopted son. Go back to the beginning: They came across what is unquestionably a crashed space ship containing an adorable human(-seeming) baby—and here we’re lucky that Kryptonians improbably look just like humans, and not bagels or green suitcases, per Marlon Brando’s wondering, or worse, some squamous, tentacle-studded or insectile monstrosity. The Kents certainly must have known they should have handed this historical being over to the government. But they didn’t. They must have also known what would have happened to him if they did. So they made a choice. They believed that people—even alien people— are basically good. So they lived their ideals and took him home. And when he grew, and they realized what he was capable of—
tremendous strength at least, maybe heat vision—any other people would have been terrified. Any rational people should have been terrified. What if this six-year old, who can lift a car, has a tantrum?

What if he lashes out in the way that’s normal and harmless for human kids, but could easily turn lethal with his strength?

But they had faith. Faith that if they loved him, not only will he love them back, he’ll love everyone else. So they do. They believe in the most powerful, terrifying thing on the planet, and he grows up to believe that the rest of his adopted species is capable of the kind of goodness that his parents were. Others saw the best in him, so he sees the best in others.

I get that now, in a way that I certainly did not at fifteen, or even thirty.

So we come to Captain America. It was reading one comic in particular (Ed Brubaker’s Captain America 10, from 2005) when I realized that as much as I liked most superheroes, if they were real, it wouldn’t particularly matter to the world at large. Sure, they’d fight other people with superpowers, and everyone would wonder about their gross violations of the laws of physics, but generally, everyone’s lives would be the same. Seeing Spider-Man duking it out with the Green Goblin overhead on my way to work might be an impressive sight, but that doesn’t change that I still have to go to work, pay bills, and live in the world just as I do now.

Not so for Cap.

For those of you who don’t know, Captain America’s central thesis is this: the proverbial 98-pound weakling Steve Rogers wants deeply to serve in WWII, to do his part, but his scrawny frame prevents him—until he’s chosen, because of his character and patriotism, to undergo an experimental procedure that turns him into the peak of human perfection. So he’s the weak man made strong; the body of an Olympic weightlifter welded to the heart of the smallest, frailest person in the room. And unlike many people who become strong (in whatever fashion), he always remembers what it’s like to be powerless and uses that strength fairly, to defend those who can’t defend themselves.

However, right before the end of the war, a bomb drops Cap into cold, Arctic waters and, instead of freezing to death, he’s put into suspended animation. (Comics, folks.) Here we enter the second stage of Cap’s character development. Now essentially FDRas-King Arthur, he’s frozen for twenty years. (In the original telling, at least; in the decades since, the time frame has lengthened, so that he awakens in the “modern” era, whenever that is at any given moment.) Think about that for a moment. He goes into the drink in 1944(ish) and comes out in 1964, just in time for the Beatles, the Civil Rights movement, and Vietnam. He missed us dropping atomic bombs on Japan, Operation Paperclip, the assassination of JFK, and more. (And the gulf only gets wider in the updated telling. Now he’s also missed the Moon landing and Watergate.) That’s a heck of a culture
shock.

And so he’s now a man out of time, struggling to adapt to a world he barely recognizes, with values that don’t seem that, well, valuable.

But here’s what’s interesting to me: He doesn’t just defrost and then gawp at the changes. His idealism isn’t gone. He’s still “the weak man made strong” and he still judges people on the content of their character, not—as we soon see—the color of their skin. Just a few years later, in 1969, Sam Wilson, a community organizer from Harlem (later, the Falcon) would become Cap’s best friend.

Considering that police in Alabama were turning fire hoses and dogs on AfricanAmericans for the temerity of sitting at the same lunch counter as whites the year before Cap thawed out, that friendship, and what it says about Captain America, is important.

No John Wayne, of heroic performances but bigoted views; here was someone who sincerely lived his principles. Sure, we as a country didn’t always live up to our lofty ideals as often as we should have, but that didn’t mean they weren’t worth striving for. And that’s what Cap believes in and represents. It was Captain America, fictional though he may be, who showed me that you can feel patriotism without being blind to the very real injustices around us, even ( especially) when they’re done in our name as Americans or for such pleasant but vague ideals as “freedom,” or “the American way.” That’s something that’s stuck with me far longer than any single punch to Hitler’s jaw or vampire decapitation. (Cap doesn’t kill outside of war, but vampires aren’t technically alive, obviously.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. Cap is apolitical, both in concept, and “in universe,”

and I think that’s appropriate. American ideals aren’t the exclusive property of one political party or the other. (Considering parties come and go, and platforms shift within those parties, how could they be?)

But issues of “religious freedom” have been in the news of late, often along with (although not interchangeable with) proposed legislation around regulating which bathrooms transgender people can and should use.

Setting aside the larger issue of those “religious freedom” cases (for a future editorial, most likely): I haven’t known many transgender people in my life. I haven’t always understood what it entailed, or what it meant for transpeople, and I have no reservations in saying that I’m still learning.

Among the things I’ve learned: transgender people are an incredibly at-risk group, highly vulnerable to depression and suicide thanks to their marginalization. In one study, out of 6,400
transgender people surveyed, 41% had attempted to kill themselves, a rate roughly ten times more than the general populace. 1 I also learned that the fears this legislation (in North Carolina in particular) is purported to allay are simply groundless; actual cases of transgender “bathroom predators” are all but myth. 2 And that’s to say nothing of how this legislation would even be enforced. 3

So we’re left with legislation that looks more and more like political theater, trading on one group’s fears of another, already-vulnerable group that they may not know much about.

I leave the legal arguments to the lawyers. All I can say is that it’s not hard to imagine that in a world where Captain America really existed, people would look at his literally perfect frame, think of his origins as a WWII-era warhorse, and assume that there’s nobody less able to understand what it’s like to deeply feel that your body simply doesn’t reflect who you are inside.

Just as I can recall what it was like to be bullied, and the importance of standing up for those
more vulnerable than you, I also imagine that Cap would recall his early years and say, “You might be surprised.”

That’s good enough for me.

1
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/28/local/la-me-ln-suicide-attempts-alarming-transgender20140127

2 “Over 200 municipalities and 18 states have nondiscrimination laws protecting transgender people’s access to facilities consistent with the gender they live every day... None of those jurisdictions have [sic] seen a rise in sexual violence or other public safety issues due to nondiscrimination laws.”

http://abcnews.go.com/US/sexual-assault-domestic-violence-organizations-debunk-bathroom-predator/story?id=38604019

3 http://www.businessinsider.com/nc-police-dont-know-how-to-enforce-hb2-2016-4.

BIOLOG

Richard A. Lovett | 572 words

SARAH FROST

Some Analog writers discover science fiction in childhood experiences they remember forever. Sarah Frost’s entry into the field came more gradually. “I don’t actually remember my first experience with science fiction,” she says. “It was probably Star Trek.” Later, her mother introduced her to Asimov, her father encouraged her to read Tolkien, and someone else gave her a box of pulps so old she had to be careful to avoid having the pages fall out as she read them. After that she became a gamer, working out character descriptions and scenarios for role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. It was a worthy substitute, she believes, for the stage many writers go through, making youthful efforts to write their own stories. “It exercises the same part of the brain,” she says.

Her first foray into fiction writing came after college, at the end of what she calls a “long and rather fraught” relationship. “I needed something to distract myself, so I wrote a fantasy novel,” she says. “As far as methods of coping go, it’s not the worst.”

The novel didn’t sell, so she shifted to short fiction—successfully enough that before she turned thirty she’d seen her first sale, “Falls the Firebrand” appear in Analog (March 2011).

Sarah grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, home to the University of Kansas. Perhaps being surrounded by a strong academic environment (and the fact that her mother was a research pharmacist and her father a professor of electrical engineering) fostered her fascination with science. Then in high school, she had the opportunity to go to an astronomy camp in Arizona, where she got to look through big telescopes... and learn what scientists can discover about distant stars simply by breaking light apart into its component spectra. “If you really think about that, it’s just incredible,” she says.

But science wasn’t a field she wanted to pursue in college. “I’m intimidated by math,” she says.

So she majored in English (at the University of Iowa), then spent a decade back in Lawrence, working for a scientific publishing house that printed journals in fields as diverse as dendrochronology (tree-ring research), paleontology, and cosmetic surgery. “We had an entire journal devoted to funguses,”

she says.

It was a job that taught her not just about littleknown scientific fields, but about the way scientists think. “People who get their views of scientists from TV just don’t understand how incredibly excited and enthusiastic these people are about stuff that on the surface might look completely pointless but is not,” she says. “They’re such cool people.”

Science, she adds, is “this incredible work of human beings over hundreds, thousands of years.

What draws me to it is the magnificence of what people have managed to discover and the magnificence of our world. That’s the driving force behind the experience of staring up at the night sky and realizing how far away all of that is and how much we can yet know [simply] by picking apart the trickle of light that comes to us.”

But stars aren’t her only interest. One of her first stories involved scientists scouring alternative universes in the hope of finding one in which a dramatic bird, the ivory-billed woodpecker, still survived. “This bird [which probably went extinct sometime in the first half of the twentieth century]

almost made it into the era where people would have cared,” she says. “The University of Kansas has two preserved ivorybilled woodpeckers, so I got to see them. It just breaks your heart.”

THE ALTERNATE VIEW

Richard A. Lovett | 2102 words

PLUTO’S PERPLEXING POLYGONS

Last summer, on July 14, 2015, I had the privilege of being at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory when the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto. I’d been following the New Horizons mission for years and was able to be present at the final moments because I’d convinced a magazine editor that this would be the last great voyage of discovery of my lifetime. When, I’d asked, will we next get a first close-up view of a chunk of real estate nearly the size of the United States?

Even if there are other, larger objects out there (and there is mounting evidence that there might be a Neptune-sized object more than six times farther out than Pluto), 1 it will be decades before we get a chance to see them.

It had also been a long time since we’d seen a major Solar System body for the first time; the last time was in 1986, when Voyager 2 flew by Uranus. “Seeing something for the first time is something my generation missed out on,” said blogger and YouTube presenter Amy Teitel. And, she noted, “If this mission can inspire the next generation to push on further, that’s awesome.”

In other words, seeing Pluto wasn’t just cool, but important. Steve Squyers, a Cornell University planetary scientist who was principle investigator for the long-running Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, put it even more strongly. “I teach a course in the history of exploration,” he said. “We talk about the usual suspects: Columbus, Magellan, James Cook— all the famous explorers. But if you ask which of those explorers truly ventured into the unknown, the answer is none. Most of their greatest discoveries had to do with the people who [already] lived in the places they were ‘discovering.’”

In space, however, every first is truly new. Not that Pluto was completely unknown. Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we had blurry maps. But all they showed was a splotchy ball that looked something like a moldy peach. There were light areas and dark areas, but the best resolutions we had were measured in hundreds of kilometers. On that scale, a map of North America wouldn’t be able to distinguish Michigan from Wisconsin.

And then, for a few dramatic hours, New Horizons whizzed by Pluto at a speed of 30,800 miles per hour, snapping so many highquality photos it will be late this fall before all are transmitted back to Earth.

Being at mission headquarters while this was happening was a remarkably emotional experience.

For a whole day, the spacecraft was too busy taking data to report back to Earth. And while its risk of hitting a deadly sand-grain-sized chunk of dust was only about one in ten thousand, there was a certain amount of nail-biting. One in ten thousand is about the risk of dying from general anesthesia during surgery. 3 You know it’s very unlikely to happen... but it could. So when New Horizons finally took a break from data gathering to ping home, the collective sigh of relief was palpable. Forget cute little BB-8, the Star Wars droid that would soon charm audiences in The Force Awakens. The robot we were cheering for that day was an ungainly foilwrapped contraption about the size of an oddly shaped refrigerator.

Texas with Polygons

And then, the data started rolling in. Photos showed a landscape nobody could have imagined. There were ten-thousand-foot mountains that might be giant H 2/sub> O icebergs floating in a sea of nitrogen ice. Other mountains looked for all the world like giant volcanoes. There were nitrogen glaciers, complete with crevasses. A sky that was honest-to-goodness blue. Surprise mounted on surprise.

But the most astounding discovery was that much of Pluto’s surface is geologically young—
meaning that Pluto isn’t the dead, frozen world most of us had imagined, but a geologically active one, still in a process of constant change.

Front-and-center in this discovery was a region informally called Sputnik Planum, geologically so young that scientists have yet to spot a single impact crater in it, even on the highestresolution images yet returned to Earth. To those who study such things, this meant the surface of Sputnik Planum could be no more than ten million years old. Otherwise, by the law of averages, something big enough to have left a visible crater should have hit it. “This is an area roughly the size of the state of Texas

[whose surface] is either recently renewed, or recently formed,” the mission’s principle investigator, Alan Stern, said last November at a meeting of the American Astronomical Association’s Division of Planetary Sciences.

And that’s just the beginning. There are indications that ten million years might be a big overstatement.

Five hundred miles across and surfaced in what appears to be a mix of nitrogen and carbon monoxide ice, Sputnik Planum is one of the bright spots seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. From the start, NASA found it intriguing enough to time New Horizons’ flyby to put it in the right place at the right time to make it one of the mission’s primary targets. 4

One of the most intriguing things about the planum’s surface is that it is covered with numerous polygons of smooth terrain (168 by one count), separated by troughs maybe a hundred meters deep.

Polygonal patterns are common on Earth, in mudflats where the mud has dried, shrunk, and cracked. But Pluto’s polygons are much larger—twenty to thirty kilometers across—and humped up by a few tens of meters in the middle. All of this suggests something entirely different, says Alexander Trowbridge, a graduate student at Purdue University, who reported his findings last December at the 2015 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Rather than being contraction features, like the polygons on mudflats, he says, Pluto’s polygons appear to be the tops of convection cells rising from deeper in the nitrogen/carbonmonoxide ice glacier that forms the planum. Ice rises in the center of them (producing the humps) then flows slowly toward the nearest edge, where it is subducted back into the interior when it collides with ice flowing the opposite direction from an adjoining cell. It’s a bit like Earth’s plate tectonics, on a much smaller scale, and it works because nitrogen ice isn’t superhard, even at Pluto temperatures (about 44°K or-380°F). That means it’s capable of flowing under pressure from slightly warmer, less dense ice attempting to rise from beneath.

Supporting this theory is the presence of what appear to be dark objects lining the bottoms of some of the inter-cell troughs like beads on a string. Initially, they were interpreted as hills, dark because they are tall enough to create shadows. But more recently, Oliver White of NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, has noted that many of them lie in areas where they could have been brought down from the mountains surrounding Sputnik Planum. Whatever their source, he
says, “they form clusters that, without exception, always congregate at the edges of cells. We may be seeing eroded fragments of highlands crust that is less dense than nitrogen ice. Once they reach the cellular terrain, they are subject to a convective regimen, reach the edges [of the cells] and congregate.”

I.e., they are comparatively buoyant materials that are too light to be drawn into the interior once they reach the subduction zones between cells.

Much Math

The idea that the polygons are convection cells wasn’t unique to Trowbridge. But rather than just pointing it out, he and his colleagues took the idea and did some modeling. And to jump to the chase, their results suggest that the mini tectonic processes occurring on Sputnik Planum occur at about the same rate as tectonic processes on Earth, making the planum’s surface much younger than ten million years.

This finding began with the realization that convection cells of this type are typically about three times wider than they are deep. Since the biggest of these cells, in the center of the planum, are about thirty kilometers across, they must also be about ten kilometers deep.

From this point on the math gets complex, but the bottom line is that it’s possible to start with what Trowbridge calls the “pretty well ac- cepted value” that Pluto is losing internal heat at an average rate of about three milliwatts per square meter (about 3% the rate on Earth) and combine that with the known insulating properties of nitrogen ice to calculate the temperature ten kilometers down.

From that, it’s possible to calculate the stiffness of the ice to see if convection is possible... and if so, how fast warmer ice (by Pluto’s standards) might rise from the bottom. His conclusion: “Not only is the nitrogen ice convecting, but it’s convecting vigorously.”

To confirm the model, Trowbridge calculated the height to which the upwelling plume would cause the ice to bulge up, finding that for a typical polygon it produced a height differential from center to edges of about eighty meters—quite consistent with New Horizons’ measurements. (As an aside, he pointed out that his model still produced convection cells even if Pluto’s internal heat flow was only 0.4 microwatts per square meter, barely one tenthousandth of the accepted value. It’s amazing, he noted, how little heat is necessary to generate convection cells in Sputnik Planum’s ice.) The final step was to determine the speed of convection.What he found was that when it reaches the surface, ice brought up by the plumes spreads sideways at about 1.5 centimeters per year. That doesn’t sound like much (it’s about half the rate at which your fingernails grow), but it’s also about the rate at which Earth’s more sluggish continents drift. It also adds up. At that rate, ice can travel from the center of a thirty-kilometer cell to its edges in a mere one million years, meaning that the surfaces are ten times younger than previously estimated.

There are, of course, a lot of uncertainties. To begin with, Trowbridge’s model is based on the assumption that heat flow through Sputnik Planum is the same as Pluto’s average, something that might not be the case. On Earth, heat flow from the interior varies from about 65 milliwatts per square meter through the continents to about half again as much through the thinner ocean-bottom crust. Not to mention that we have volcanic hot spots, like Hawaii and Iceland, where heat flow is much larger.

But if I were going to guess, it would be that when the measurements come in, Sputnik Planum will prove to be a hot spot, indeed. Everything about it, beginning with its circular shape and the ring of ten-thousandto twelvethousand-foot peaks surrounding it—and including the fact that it’s on the
side of Pluto directly opposite its giant moon Charon—suggests it’s the remnant of a giant impact that penetrated deep into Pluto’s interior. Such an impact would not only have produced a convenient location for nitrogen ice to collect but might also have provided an easy channel for heat to escape from deeper down. And the planum’s position on the side opposite Charon could be a result of Charon’s tides forcing Pluto to turn its opposite face toward its moon, rather than the one with the deep hole in it.

For all of that, however, time will tell. When it comes to looking at New Horizons as our last great voyage of discovery, the specific findings, however fascinating and however much they may tell us about the Solar System as a whole and ultimately our own planet, aren’t as important as the simple fact that we got out there to see whatever there was to find.

As recently as April 2015, I wrote an Analog fact article about Pluto and what New Horizons might find when it got there. Nothing in that article turned out to be remotely relevant to what we’ve actually observed. And if that’s not an argument for continuing our explorations, not only of Pluto but of anywhere else we can get to, I don’t know what is.

1 Eric Hand, “Astronomers Say a Neptune-Sized Planet Lurks Beyond Pluto,” Science online, 20

January 2016.

2 On Earth, he suggests, the only true explorers in modern history were people like Ernest Shackleton, who delved deep into the frozen expanses of Antarctica, or William Beebe and Otis Barton, whose 1930s contrivance called the bathysphere was the first to carry explorers into the ocean depths.

3 G.M. Woerlee, “Is General Anesthesia Safe?” (undated) www.anesthesiaweb.org/risk.php.

4 In theory this means that there might be a second great voyage of discovery in my lifetime, since New Horizons was only able to get good photos of one side of Pluto during its flyby. That means there’s another half-planet out there waiting to be mapped. Not that the mission got no photos of the other side of Pluto, but Pluto’s slow rotation meant that those were taken from a million or more miles away—making them far better than anything from Hubble, but still mysterious.

IN TIMES TO COME

154 words

Next month is our October issue, and in keeping with our seasonal tradition, we have an assortment of stories, ghoulish and grim, but still every bit science fictional: There’s a classic locked-room mystery in Robert R. Chase’s “The Revenge of the Invisible Man”; a look at the happy face we put on for our children in MaryLee Boyance’s “Mom in the Moon”; something that resembles a ghost story in Ron Collins’ “The Blue Lady of Entanglement Chamber 1”; the return of a covert operative who thought he was out, but who is indeed very much back in, in Adam-Troy Castro’s “The Soul Behind the Face”; a dire deadline in which to solve a riddle in

“Angles of Incidence” by Nancy Fulda; and a look at the pitfalls in searching for the next stage of humanity is JL Forrest’s “Progenesis,” as well as all our customary columns and articles.

See you then!

All contents are subject to change.

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers | 2225 words

Those who don’t know them well assume that science fiction and religion don’t get along. The truth, of course, is more complicated.

In the beginning (catchy phrase, eh?) there was no distinction between the two. All of the UR-SF/fantasy that we love to quote—the Ancient Greeks, Ezekiel’s flying wheels, the Mahabarata, Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308–1390), even the works of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) and Voltaire (1694–1778)—were religious works, either outright mythologies or reactions to religious orthodoxy. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) involves the relationship between the scientist and God. After Darwin, a slew of British writers used the tropes of SF to explore the relationship between scientific humanism and Christianity.

Literary SF continued to deal with religious themes down to current times. Notable example include H. G. Wells’s story of angelic visitation (The Wonderful Visit,1895) and his rewrite of the Book Of Job (The Undying Fire, 1919); Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937); the theological SF of C. S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938 and Perelandra, 1943); many works by Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007); Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration (1976); Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1989); and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996).

Genre SF has always been fascinated with religion, although in the pulp era the subject was all but taboo. Starting with a few tentative steps in the Campbell era, genre SF mainly approached religion in four overlapping ways.

One way was for science to masquerade as religion. Isaac Asimov used this approach in early Foundation stories (1942), as did Robert A Heinlein (Sixth Column, 1942) and Fritz Leiber (Gather Darkness, 1943). In the postwar era, there was a vogue for stories using SF tropes to explain Christian mythology (“... and the names of those two explorers were Adam and Eve.”) For these stories, Brian W. Aldiss coined the term “Shaggy God Stories.” More serious examples include Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man! (1969) and Barry Malzberg’s Cross of Fire (1982).

Another way SF deals with religion is by using elements of real religions as part of the story.

Examples include “The Quest for St. Aquin” by Anthony Boucher (1951); James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1953); “The Star” by Arthur C. Clarke (1955); Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967), Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969), and Isle of the Dead (1969); and Robert A. Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984).

Then there are fictional religions. Sometimes these are tyrannical, oppressive cults that need to be defeated (as in the Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914–1943; “If This Goes On—” by Robert A. Heinlein, 1940; Kiteworld by Keith Roberts, 1985; and many other examples). Other times they are more benign, as in This Fortress World by James E. Gunn (1955); A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1960); Philip Jose Farmer’s The Lovers (1961) and Night of Light (1966); Frank Herbert’s The God Makers (1972); A Choice of Gods by Clifford D. Simak (1972); Gene Wolfe’s New Sun series (1980-1987); Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson (1992); Kaleidoscope Century by John Barnes (1995); and Alastair Reynolds’s Absolution Gap (2003).

Fictional religions can also come from aliens. Notable works include Theodore Sturgeon’s

“Microcosmic God” (1941); “Unhuman Sacrifice” by Katharine MacLean (1958); Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961); D. G. Compton’s The Missionaries (1972); God’s

World by Ian Watson (1979); and The Tides of God by Ted Reynolds (1989). Robert Silverberg deserves special mention as the creator of several alien religions... but more on him below.

Finally, there’s straight-out religious science fiction, in which authors directly tackle philosophical and theological themes through the lens of religious belief (or the lack thereof).

Examples are legion; some writers tend to return to these themes throughout their careers. Particular examples that spring to mind are James Blish (the aforementioned A Case of Conscience, Black Easter, 1968, The Day After Judgment, 1971, and an influential 1964 critical essay, “Cathedrals in Space”); Arthur C. Clarke (especially Childhood’s End, 1953 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968); Philip K. Dick (A Maze of Death, 1970, The Divine Invasion, 1981, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, 1972); Robert J. Sawyer; Robert Silverberg (such works as Nightwings, 1969, Downward to the Earth, 1970, Tom O’Bedlam, 1986, and many more); Clifford D. Simak (especially A Choice of Gods, 1972, and Project Pope, 1981); and George Zebrowski (particularly the Omega Point trilogy, 1983).

So with all this going on, why the widespread impression that SF and religion don’t get along? In my opinion, SF and religion have a fundamental inconsistency. In science fiction we’re accustomed to change, breaking rules, examining alternatives. Most religions, on the other hand, are more accustomed to certainty, eternal truths, firm beliefs.

In fact, SF and religion are like any good friends on opposite ends of whatever spectrum you care to name. Sometimes, they just have to agree to disagree.

Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection Between Space Travel and Religion

edited by Paul Levinson and Michael Waltemathe

Fordham University Press, 280 pages, $19.95 (trade paperback) Kindle: $9.99 (e-book) ISBN: 978-0823-27210-5

Genre: Anthologies, Religious/Philosophical SF

Anthologies of religious SF are a dime a dozen; a new one comes out every couple of years. In one sense, Touching the Face of the Cosmos is part of this tradition. Yet it’s also something more.

Editors Paul Levinson and Michael Waltemathe—the former a well-known SF writer, the latter a University lecturer in religious education—set out with the express goal of encouraging public interest in space exploration. To that end, they’ve assembled a volume of nonfiction essays and SF
stories by a huge variety of authors.

In fifteen academic essays, thirteen stories, and one interview, this book examines the intersection of space and religion from various different directions, including several religious traditions, humanism, atheism, and through alien eyes. If you’re interested in the subject, there are enough fascinating ideas here to fill weeks and months of thought.

The book starts with Paul Levinson’s fascinating interview with John Glenn. Then come the essays, on topics ranging from a Jesuit astronomer’s musings on space exploration as religious
pilgrimage to a philosopher’s questions about the faith of aliens, from a space policy expert’s reflections on religion as a motivator for space exploration to an SF writer’s advice for fostering communication between futurists and religious believers.

But it’s the SF stories you really want to know about. They’re a mixed bag, some big names and some relative newcomers; some heavy philosophy and some light entertainment. The big names include Gregory Benford, Jack Dann, Paul Levinson, and Robert J. Sawyer. Regular Analog readers will be delighted to find stories by Arlan Andrews, Sr. and Dave Creek.

Among the standout stories are Sawyer’s “Come All Ye Faithful,” in which a priest on Mars encounters a crisis of faith, Dave Creek’s morality tale “Kayanoga’s Decision,” and “Jumping the Road” by Jack Dann, a rabbi’s sojourn among the alien Jewish community of the world Tobias.

If you’re looking for a state-of-the-art snap- shot of the current relationship between SF and religion, this is definitely the book for you.

Beltrunner

Sean O’Brien

EDGE-Lite, 253 pages

Kindle: $5.99 (e-book)

Genre: Adventure SF

Sometimes you’re not in the mood for anything deep and meaningful. You just want a good read, a nice solid book with which to while away a day or so. In the old days, we called these

“potboilers”—that is, modest books written to earn enough to keep the author’s lights on and stove lit, i.e. “to keep the pot boiling.” If you wanted good potboilers, you’d turn to the likes of Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Murray Leinster, Andre Norton, or Mack Reynolds. (Please note, I’m not saying that these authors didn’t also write important books.) When you picked up one of these books, you could depend on the author to give you a good read.

Sean O’Brien’s Beltrunner is, in the very best sense, a modern potboiler.

Collier South is an asteroid miner of the old school. He was in the Belt before the corporations came, when asteroid miners were proud loners always on the quest for the big strike that would set them up for life.

The big strike never came for Collier. Instead, he’s watched the corporations move in, watched the economics of Belt mining change. One by one, independent miners have gone out of business, most of them to join the corporations who drove them out. Even the woman he loved spurned him and became an operative for the corporations.

Collier is as proud and independent as they come, and he’s not about to give up. In his ship Dulcinea, accompanied by loyal ship’s computer Sancho, he struggles on. His debts rise, and the corporations flagrantly break laws to steal a valuable claim from him. Desperate, he takes a chance on a rogue asteroid at the limit of his ship’s capability— and hits it big.

It’s not ore that Collier finds; instead, it’s an alien artifact with the power to transmute elements.

Collier has in his hands the means to change the whole economic and political structure of the Belt. And that doesn’t sit well with the corporate overlords. Suddenly, Collier is on the run—and if he can’t figure out how to keep his discovery out of corporate hands, his career may be over. Not to mention his life.

Beltrunner actually has a lot to say about independence and interdependence, as it plays the changes on one of the oldest tropes in science fiction. But most of all, it’s just a cracking good story.

Company Town

Madeline Ashby

Tor, 256 pages, $24.99 (hardcover)

iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $11.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0765-38290-0

Genre: Cyberpunk, SF Mystery

In the near future, Company Town (formally New Arcadia) is a city perched on a huge oil rig far off Canada’s Atlantic coast. As the story begins, Company Town has been purchased by Lynch, Ltd—a family-owned corporation that has its fingers in just about every pie in a world gripped by climate change. The future is uncertain—will the Lynches continue to operate the failing rig, shut it down entirely, or take some other path?

Go Jung-hwa, known as Hwa, doesn’t care about the Lynches. She has a steady job as a bodyguard-for-hire, and she’s content with her life. As one of the few non-augmented people in Company Town, Hwa’s become an expert in self-defense, a formidable fighter much in demand in the rough-and-tumble town.

Then the Lynches hire Hwa as bodyguard and martial arts instructor for Joel Lynch, the youngest scion of the family. Dissatisfaction with the Lynches is making itself known: there are riots, attempted sabotage, and death threats—protecting Joel is a full-time job.

Meanwhile, a serial killer is loose in the deteriorating community, spreading fear and ratcheting up the tension with each set of murders. Worse, all evidence seems to point to Hwa herself....

As Company Town descends further into chaos, Hwa has to track down the real identity of the murderer before she’s the next victim.

Company Town is an intense, claustrophobic thriller set in a high-energy transhuman dystopia, and Hwa’s a compelling, sympathetic character. This is Madeline Ashby’s first book; she’s definitely a name to watch out for.

Arabella of Mars

David D. Levine

Tor, 352 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)

iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $12.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-7653-8281-8

Genre: Alternate History, Mars, Steampunk

David D. Levine’s career has taken a traditional path that few authors follow today: He’s made his name writing short stories, and Arabella of Mars is his first novel. You’ve seen his work in these pages, most recently in the December 2014 issue with the story “Mammals.” His 2015 story

“Damage” was nominated for the Nebula Award.

In this alternate history, Captain William Kidd led the first expedition to Mars in the late 1600s. In the next century and a half, technology based on clockwork automata allowed England to colonize the Red Planet and spread its influence through the solar system.

In 1812, Arabella Ashby is a young woman growing up on a Martian plantation. Arabella’s the vexation of her traditional mother. Instead of behaving like a proper young lady, she works with her father maintaining the colony’s machines, or goes on unscheduled expeditions with her brother and his Martian nanny. Mother, having had enough, decides to send Arabella to London for expert training.

Fate, however, has a different course planned for young Arabella. On Earth, she discovers a plot to assassinate her family and knows that desperate action is necessary. Disguising herself as a boy, she enlists in the crew of the Diana, a space vessel of the Mars Trading Company.

Now all Arabella needs to do is get to Mars—if she can get past the war between England and France, a captain with a mysterious past, and a mutinous crew.

Arabella of Mars is a fun read, in an H. G. Wells meets C. S. Forester fashion. The clockwork technology is fascinating, the melodrama is delicious, and Arabella herself is delightful. Definitely recommended.

Using Medicine in Science Fiction: The SF Writer’s Guide to Human Biology

H. G. Stratmann

Springer, 556 pages, $29.99 (trade paperback)

Kindle: $16.19 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-3-319-16014-6

Genre: Nonfiction

Yet another useful and absorbing volume from the folks at Springer.

H. G. Stratmann is no stranger to Analog readers: He writes both fiction (most recently,

“Prometheus” in the May 2013 issue) and fact articles (“Galactic Cannibalism,” July 2013). In the outside world, he’s a cardiologist in private practice, formerly Professor of Medicine at St. Louis University School of Medicine. This guy knows his stuff.

His stuff, of course, is medicine with an SF bent. Here he presents just about every topic you can imagine: a basic introduction to the human body, space medicine, suspended animation, the effects of radiation, immortality, sex, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, stem cells, bionics, and techniques for SF writers to use all this knowledge in their stories.

The usual Springer volume features nonfiction and fiction—in this case, the nonfiction essays are so complete and informative, there wasn’t room for any fiction. That’s a bit of a shame, since Stratmann writes a fine story... but I don’t think there will be many complaints.

For SF writers as well as interested readers—which definitely describes the Analog audience—
this is a must-read.

And now that we know what Stratmann’s been doing these past few years, let’s hope for a quick return to Analog’s pages.

And with that, I believe I’m out of space. See you next issue.

Don Sakers is the author of Meat and Machine, Elevenses, and the Rule of Five serial at rule-of-5.com). For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

BRASS TACKS

442 words

Dear Mr. Quachri,

I’m enjoying the January/February issue, but I feel moved to break off a while with a few thoughts.

The guest editorials are always interesting and thought provoking but I would like to hear more from you. Astounding/Analog (I go back a long way) has always felt like a personal relationship with the editor, whether it was John Campbell, Ben Bova, or Stan Schmidt. (I don’t go back as far as Tremayne or Bates!) So: not a moan, but a request.

Secondly, I do like the serials. There have been great ones even in recent years, but I think back to particular years that show cased The World of Null A, Gunner Cade Mission of Gravity, Double Star, Dune, and too many others to list. The history of mod ern science fiction is on my shelves in bound ASF copies going back to 1944, and I read them often. So, keep them coming. Any hope of more from Robert Sawyer?

Edward Truscoe

Surrey, UK

Thank you for your feedback; we try to strike a balance with our guest editorials and hope that you enjoy this issue’s column.

Dear Editors,

It was a nice coincidence to read John Cramer’s The Alternate View in the March 2016 issue

[“Gravity with 4-Vector Potentials”] shortly after the announcement that gravity waves had been detected by LIGO. According to Cramer, this detection will falsify either Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (GR), or Mead’s theory of gravity as a 4-vectory potential (G4V). Since all of the reports on the detection claim that it is yet another confirmation of GR, I would be interested in knowing if Cramer considers it a falsification of G4V.

Jeffrey R. Carter

Mesa, AZ

The author responds:

In my March AV column, I oversimplified the difference between the GR and G4V predictions of LIGO detector response. The differences lie mainly in the polarization of the gravitational waves.

Since the LIGO designers chose to more-or-less align the detectors in Hanford, WA and Livingstone, LA, they don't have sufficient sensitivity to say anything about the polarization of the waves they detected. Carver Mead is working intensively to determine if G4V can fit the new LIGO data as well as GR, but I've heard no results from that effort yet. I am told that when the VIRGO gravitational wave detector in Italy comes online, the three-detector ensemble will have good polarization sensitivity, enabling a more definitive test of rival theories.

John G. Cramer

Dear Editors,

Thank you for “Theories of Mind” by Conor Powers Smith in the January/February Analog. Smith accomplished one of the most difficult tasks in science fiction: building an alien species and world that seemed truly alien.

Tom Marsh

Houston TX

Greetings!

“Playthings” by Stephen Burns [April 2016] was nicely done! The story flowed and made sense.

C. Henry Depew

UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis | 412 words

NOTE: Membership rates and other details often change after we have gone to press. In addition, most conventions have age-based membership rates in advance and at the door. There also may be rates for single days. Check the websites for the most recent information.

8–10 September 2016

STARKANE (50th Anniversary Star Trek celebration) at Red Lion Hotel, Post Falls ID. Info: http://www.starkane.com/; stardust_enter tainment_services@yahoo.com; P.O. box 563, Otis Orchards WA 99027-0563.

15–18 September 2016

BOUCHERCON 47: WORLD MYSTERY CONVENTION: BLOOD ON THE BAYOU at Marriott Hotel Canal Street, New Orleans LA. Guests of Honor: Harlan Coben, Craig Robertson, R. L. Stine, Julie Smith, David Morrell, Jon & Ruth Jordan; TMs: Harley Jane Kozak and Alexandra Sokoloff.

Info: http://www. bouchercon2016.com/.

22 September 2016

26th FIRST IG NOBEL PRIZE CEREMONY at Saunders Theatre, Harvard University, Cambridge MA. Sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research. Awards will be presented for research in interesting corners of science. Info: www.improbable.com.

23–25 September 2016

FENCON XIII (Dallas/Fort Worth TX area SF, Fsy & Filk conference) at Westin Dallas Fort Worth Airport, Irving TX. Guest of Honor: Jim C. Hines, Music GoHs: Bill & Brenda Sutton; Fen GoH: Sarah Felix; Artist GoH: Kristina Carroll; Science GoH: Michael S. Brotherton; Gaming GoH: Tiffany Franzoni; TM: Esther Friesner. Info: http://www.fencon.org/.

30 September–2 October 2016

CONTRAFLOW VI (New Orleans area SF & Fsy conference) at New Orleans Airport Hilton, Kenner LA. Info: http://contraflowsci fi.org/.

30 September–2 October 2016

ARCHON 40 (St. Louis MO area SF & Fsy conference) at Gateway Convention Center and DoubleTree Hotel, Collinsville IL. Guest of Honor: Ellen Datlow; Artist GoH: John Picacio; Masquerade GoH: Evil Ted Smith; TM: Brad Denton; Masquerade MC: Vic Milan. Info: http://archonstl.org/.

9–13 August 2017

WORLDCON 75 (75th World Science Fiction Convention) at Messukeskus, the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre, Helsinki, Finland. Guests of Honour: John-Henri Holmberg, Nalo Hopkinson, Johanna Sinisalo, Claire Wendling, Walter Jon Williams. This is the SF universe’s annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: http://www.worldcon.fi/; info@worldcon.fi.

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TREVOR QUACHRI........................................ Editor EMILY HOCKADAY............................ Assistant Editor DEANNA MCLAFFERTY................ Editorial Assistant JAYNE KEISER............................ Typesetting Director SUZANNE LEMKE......... Assistant Typesetting Manager

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXVI, No. 9, September 2016. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2016 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

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